AI, TikTok, and the Shrinking of Your Soul

During the lockdown, the NHS – the British healthcare system – became overwhelmed, many people needed care, and suddenly, I found myself with a lot of patients with  a common theme in the sessions: too much free time, too much space to be filled, very few social options to run from the emptiness that haunted them. So many processes developed from the fact that people had to sit with two kinds of pain and face their inner voids. Many of them set out to find their voice, try new activities, finish the books piling up, exercise.

When the lockdown ended and that empty space was once again filled with everything we use to run from ourselves, I began to notice something new showing up in the clinic. Something that, at the time, I called a coincidence, since there were only a few cases and I needed more time to confirm my suspicions – years, in fact.

Three of my long-time patients, people I had been working with for over two years, self-diagnosed with ADHD. They self-diagnosed after watching people on TikTok talking about ADHD and its symptoms. But never, in the past three years, had symptoms like the ones they began to describe ever been mentioned in sessions.

Before I go on, it’s important to look at the timeline:

TikTok was created in 2016, launched in 2017. By 2019 it already existed, but was still seen as a teen dancing app. In 2020, with the start of lockdown, TikTok exploded.

Do you remember the dance challenges that so many people joined during lockdown? Do you remember how, back then, that video format didn’t even exist on Instagram yet? And remember how those same dances migrated to Instagram, and people started dancing and pointing at texts in their videos as if no one could read stationary text unless someone pointed to where we were supposed to look?

So let’s recall how media consumption evolved on Instagram:

The option to post 15-second stories launched in 2016 and in 2020, Instagram launched Reels, inspired by TikTok – short videos, vertical feeds, quick cuts.

Now, back to the story.

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Around 2022 and 2023, more people around me and more patients started saying they had ADHD, because they were showing symptoms like:
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- Difficulty concentrating, especially with monotonous tasks.
- Starting many things at once and not finishing.
- “Foggy brain” or the feeling of having a thousand tabs open in your head.
- Losing track of what you were saying mid-conversation.
- Always being late or feeling like you “don’t know where to start.”
- Difficulty organizing the day, even when you want to.
- Difficulty initiating simple tasks (e.g., replying to emails).
- Chronic procrastination.
- “Paralysis” even with easy or urgent tasks.
- Feeling constantly overwhelmed, even without having done anything.

Today, in 2025, the number of people self-diagnosing with ADHD and autism is something we've never seen before.

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And suddenly, I started feeling all of it too. Paralysis when faced with a simple decision. The sense of being stuck just from needing to organize what I’d do in the morning. And the symptom that, for me, was the clearest sign that something bigger than an ADHD epidemic was going on: I could no longer read. Not in the same way.

And I’ve always, absolutely always, not only loved reading but found it very easy, during my whole life. When I was 12, I won an award at school for being the student who borrowed the most books from the library. And suddenly, where did that girl go? Because she wasn't existing in me anymore.

So for me, that moment was essential – to ask myself why – just like what was happening with many of my patients – I, too, was experiencing symptoms I had never felt before. Was it because I worked too much during the lockdown and took on more clients than I should have? Is it my age? And the more I questioned myself, the more it appeared in others too.

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And now, with Artificial Intelligence in the mix, I began to reflect, to research, and I realized that if we remove the self-diagnosis and look at the symptoms with a critical and investigative lens, it becomes very clear where this epidemic comes from: for the past 5 years, we’ve been training our brains daily to consume fast, short, vertical media. For 5 years now, we’ve been reading either with someone’s index finger dancing on screen pointing at the text, or through 10-slide carousels on Instagram. It’s no surprise that reading two pages of a book now feels like the same effort as reading the entire book in one or two days.

And beyond format, we have to look at the type of content we’re consuming. Today, we swallow down multiple types of material at once. I open Instagram and, in less than a second, I see Shih Tzus, cake recipes, and a deep philosophical analysis on how trauma shapes the way we see life. Three friends send me memes, friends who are also messaging me on WhatsApp or Messenger at the same time.

When, in the past, was our brain ever exposed to that? When, during a learning moment or even leisure, would we access more than 10 different topics in under one minute? Is it really that shocking to feel like our brain is overfunctioning, nearly crashing like a game over screen?

Consumption and artificial assistance have assassinated critical and individual thinking. Today anyone can be an expert in anything.

By the way, don’t believe everything I say or write here. Do your own research, form your own opinions. Don’t consume me as if I were a truth-entity living inside your phone.

Because by doing that, from a Jungian perspective, we are drying out our souls.

And that’s what I want to talk about in the next posts:

• AI and critical thinking.
• AI as a tool and not as a nuclear point of consciousness.
• The shape of the psyche in Jung – is your soul expanding or shrinking?
• Inattention: difficulty starting things, at a time when AI does everything in seconds.
• How do we expand and resist the shrinking of the psyche?

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* For this post I've used AI to translate my text from portuguese to english, to ask the dates about TikTok and Instagram launching different formats, and to suggest tags for SEO purposes.

** Image Credit: Sean Mundy

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