Detecting a Proxy for Potential Comorbid ADHD in People Reporting Anxiety Symptoms from Social Media Data

TL;DR

This paper tackles the problem of detecting a proxy for comorbid ADHD in individuals reporting anxiety by leveraging Reddit data and a transformer-based classifier (RoBERTa) trained on posting trajectories. It distinguishes anxiety-only posters from those who later engage with the ADHD subreddit, achieving 76% accuracy on a 50% base-rate test and outperforming keyword baselines. The work also introduces explainability visualizations to interpret model decisions and discusses limitations, ethical considerations, and practical implications for understanding the anxiety–ADHD relationship. Overall, the study demonstrates that non-keyword cues captured by transformers can reveal meaningful signals about comorbidity in social-media text and provides a framework for qualitative insights into this clinical concern.

Abstract

We present a novel task that can elucidate the connection between anxiety and ADHD; use Transformers to make progress toward solving a task that is not solvable by keyword-based classifiers; and discuss a method for visualization of our classifier illuminating the connection between anxiety and ADHD presentations. Up to approximately 50% of adults with ADHD may also have an anxiety disorder and approximately 30\% of adults with anxiety may also have ADHD. Patients presenting with anxiety may be treated for anxiety without ADHD ever being considered, possibly affecting treatment. We show how data that bears on ADHD that is comorbid with anxiety can be obtained from social media data, and show that Transformers can be used to detect a proxy for possible comorbid ADHD in people with anxiety symptoms. We collected data from anxiety and ADHD online forums (subreddits). We identified posters who first started posting in the Anxiety subreddit and later started posting in the ADHD subreddit as well. We use this subset of the posters as a proxy for people who presented with anxiety symptoms and then became aware that they might have ADHD. We fine-tune a Transformer architecture-based classifier to classify people who started posting in the Anxiety subreddit and then started posting in the ADHD subreddit vs. people who posted in the Anxiety subreddit without later posting in the ADHD subreddit. We show that a Transformer architecture is capable of achieving reasonable results (76% correct for RoBERTa vs. under 60% correct for the best keyword-based model, both with 50% base rate).