Google Trends sheds light on interest in maladaptive daydreaming over time

The open access journal The Qualitative Report, has recently published a paper by ICMDR scholars titled: The Micro-Politics of a New Mental Condition: Legitimization in Maladaptive Daydreamers' Discourse. The paper describes a grass-root consumer campaign to promote the study of maladaptive daydreaming (MD) in the hope of promoting the recognition of the phenomenon and knowledge on its effective treatment for it among clinicians and researchers.

We recently logged on Google Trends to assess the changes in global interest in MD in the past decade. We compared Google searches of the exact term of 'Maladaptive daydreaming' to searches of two equivalent terms: the very popular term of 'fantasising' and the related scientific term of 'mind wandering'. The figure speaks for itself. The colloquial term 'fantasising" seems to draw a stable interest throughout the decade (in blue), there seems to be a slight increase in searches for 'mind wandering" (in yellow) and the term 'maladaptive daydreaming' (in red), virtually unknown and not searched a decade ago, shows a remarkable increase of worldwide interest.

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