Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Shame and stigma
A blank face is not usually an angry one. If you tend to read disappointment into people who are only tired or thinking, that reading is a habit, and habits can be checked.
Two things feed it. Reading faces accurately is genuinely harder for some people with ADHD, and if you grew up being told off a great deal, expecting disapproval is a reasonable thing to have learned. A test for the moment it happens: what exactly is this face telling me, and what else might it be saying? Then, where you can, ask.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Avoid making too many assumptions (Quran 49:12). The instruction covers what we conclude about other people, including what we conclude from a face.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱجۡتَنِبُواْ كَثِيرࣰ ا مِّنَ ٱلظَّنِّ إِنَّ بَعۡضَ ٱلظَّنِّ إِثۡمࣱۖ وَلَا تَجَسَّسُواْ وَلَا يَغۡتَب بَّعۡضُكُم بَعۡضًاۚ أَيُحِبُّ أَحَدُكُمۡ أَن يَأۡكُلَ لَحۡمَ أَخِيهِ مَيۡتࣰ ا فَكَرِهۡتُمُوهُۚ وَٱتَّقُواْ ٱللَّهَۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ تَوَّابࣱ رَّحِيمࣱ
Believers, avoid making too many assumptions- some assumptions are sinful- and do not spy on one another or speak ill of people behind their backs: would any of you like to eat the flesh of your dead brother? No, you would hate it. So be mindful of God: God is ever relenting, most merciful
Qur’an 49:12read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A protocol for a randomised study of compassion focused therapy for the self stigma of mental disorders rests on the rationale that shame is the emotional core of self stigma. A protocol sets out a planned trial rather than reporting results, so it carries no finding yet. It is cited here only for the idea underneath it: that in these moments shame, rather than information, is doing much of the work.
Riebel M, Rohmer O, Charles E, Lefebvre F, Weibel S, Weiner L. (2023). Compassion-focused therapy (CFT) for the reduction of the self-stigma of mental disorders: the COMpassion for Psychiatric disorders, Autism and Self-Stigma (COMPASS) study protocol for a randomized controlled study.. Trials doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Checking the guess against what the person actually says stops one reading turning into the fact.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Rejection sensitivity is something clinicians see often in ADHD, and it is not a diagnosis in any manual. It can describe what happens to you accurately without being a label anyone can write in your notes.
The disbelief that hurts most rarely comes from strangers. It comes from a parent, a sibling or a cousin who calls the whole thing an excuse.
ADHD now sits with the neurodevelopmental conditions in the diagnostic manual rather than under disorders that begin in childhood. That move carries a claim worth hearing: this is about how a brain is built, and it does not stop at eighteen.