Back in June, I wrote about TikTok being the king of mental health misinformation. 👑

"Eat an orange in the shower to eliminate anxiety."

"Write for 15 minutes to cure trauma in an hour."

That post hit nearly 70% open rate. You were angry. I was angry. And we should have been.

As social media sites have publicly said they want to do better, I thought maybe we'd moved on.

We haven't.

A recent March study looked at more than 5,000 posts across YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X about mental health topics. The findings?

Misinformation was most common in posts about neurodivergence. Autism. ADHD.

Not depression. Not anxiety.

Autism.

Forty-one percent of autism videos on TikTok contained inaccurate information. More than half of ADHD videos. And TikTok had the highest rates of any platform in the study.

I have a son with autism. 💖

So, this one isn't just professional for me. It's personal.

Here's what those videos are doing.

They're telling families that vaccines caused their child's autism. They're selling supplements as treatment. They're promoting "miracle cures" that range from useless to genuinely dangerous. They're platforming people with no clinical training, no accountability, and a ring light -- the same dynamic I wrote about in June.

And they're doing it to a community that is already exhausted. Already fighting insurance companies, school systems, and waiting lists. Already being told by the culture that autism is a tragedy to be fixed rather than a difference to be understood.

That's stigma. With an algorithm behind it.

Here's what I keep asking myself as a dad and as a clinician.

When a parent finds one of these videos at 2am -- scared, sleep-deprived, desperate for answers about their child -- and the video has 3 million views and 200,000 likes...

What chance does the truth have?

I've watched families come into my office carrying months and years of bad information. Not because they were foolish. Because they were scared and the algorithm was faster than their pediatrician.

That's not an education problem. That's a stigma problem. Because when society treats autism like a crisis to be solved rather than a population to be supported, it creates the exact conditions where misinformation thrives. People don't look for bad information on purpose. They look for hope.

Bad actors just figured out how to sell it with good lighting.

And here's where it gets worse.

The federal government right now is supposed to be the counterweight. The institution that funds real research, sets evidence-based policy, and protects families from exactly this kind of noise.

Instead, the federal autism advisory committee -- the body that controls hundreds of millions in research funding -- just met for the first time in 19 months. Why the gap?

Because RFK Jr., one of our least favorite people in the world when it comes to stigmatizing autism (I wrote more about that here), fired most of the scientific experts and replaced them with advocates whose views align with the vaccine-autism claim that the research community has rejected for decades.

The people who were supposed to correct the misinformation are now helping spread it.

That's not just a policy failure. That's a clinical emergency for every family trying to navigate an autism diagnosis right now.

Here's what I want you to do this week. 👇

One thing. Just one.

When you see autism content on social media, especially anything promising a cause, a cure, or a quick fix, pause before you share it. Ask one question: who made this and what are their credentials?

Not to be cynical. Not to dismiss every creator. But because families watching that content deserve better than a ring light and a trending sound.

And if you're a mental health professional reading this, many of your clients are seeing this content. They're not going to tell you unless you ask. So, ask them.

Until next time, come back...be here.

Keith

P.S. - I completely forgot that April was autism awareness month, so this is my attempt at correcting that.