Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › When you use something to cope
If telling your doctor or midwife what you are using feels impossible, you can ask someone you already trust to pass it on for you, with your permission and in your words.
People often stay quiet with the very clinician who could help, because saying it out loud feels heavier than the problem does. Handing the message to someone who already knows keeps you in charge of what gets said while taking the hardest part off you. If you are the one being asked to carry it, agree exactly what may be shared and stay inside that.
If you are using something to cope and it has become hard to stop, please speak to a doctor before changing anything.
Qur’an and Sunnah
it is God Himself who accepts repentance from His servants (Quran 9:104). What you are frightened to say is already received above, which makes saying it below a little less frightening.
أَلَمۡ يَعۡلَمُوٓاْ أَنَّ ٱللَّهَ هُوَ يَقۡبَلُ ٱلتَّوۡبَةَ عَنۡ عِبَادِهِۦ وَيَأۡخُذُ ٱلصَّدَقَٰتِ وَأَنَّ ٱللَّهَ هُوَ ٱلتَّوَّابُ ٱلرَّحِيمُ
Do they not know that it is God Himself who accepts repentance from His servants and receives what is given freely for His sake? He is always ready to accept repentance, most merciful
Qur’an 9:104read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a cross-sectional study of people with alcohol dependence, those who had taken negative stereotypes about themselves to heart had less confidence in their ability to refuse a drink. Shame was quietly eating the capacity it demanded. This is a snapshot rather than a study of cause, so read it as a strong hint that anything lowering the shame around telling someone is likely to be worth it.
Schomerus G, Corrigan PW, Klauer T, Kuwert P, Freyberger HJ, Lucht M. (2011). Self-stigma in alcohol dependence: consequences for drinking-refusal self-efficacy.. Drug and alcohol dependence doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Care can only reach the part of your situation that somebody who can act on it knows about.
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
Nicotine looks like the small problem next to everything else going on, and it is the one most likely to still be here in thirty years.
The useful part is not the chart on the wall. It is that the person could think of things to do instead, and that took months of quiet work to arrive at.
There are medicines that make stopping smoking easier, and one of them can sometimes cover a mood or attention problem at the same time. That is a fair thing to ask a doctor about.