Red Note Signals #1: China’s New Way of Coping with Anxiety: Self-Diagnosed ADHD

Inaugural piece focuses on mental health and the wave of people informally “diagnosing” themselves with ADHD on Red Note

This is a new series I’m working on with Peiyue Wu that we’re calling Red Note Signals. Red Note, in our mind, is a microcosm of consumption trends and societal sentiment, and a pretty good early read on what’s coming next. We’re treating it less as a lifestyle app and more as a live archive of how China is spending, aspiring, and coping. The topics and trends we spot there are worth dissecting.

Our inaugural piece focuses on mental health and the wave of people informally “diagnosing” themselves with ADHD on Red Note. It’s not that different from the old habit of cross-checking every rash on WebMD—and now asking ChatGPT about every symptom—but it points to something larger. As the outside world feels stagnant, this becomes an extension of the logic of 躺平 (“lying flat”) by turning inward: if you can’t move the system, you start scanning and reinterpreting yourself, trying to make peace with what you can’t change.

For an older generation in China, anxiety didn’t really have a psychological vocabu…