Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Shame and stigma
Cheer up, calm down, try harder. It is the same instruction wearing three different names, and treating every difficulty as a question of effort turns each symptom into a comment on your character.
This assumption is old and it is everywhere, so most people have absorbed a good deal of it long before anyone offers them another explanation. You can hear it in your own voice: the moment you call yourself lazy about something you have tried at repeatedly, that is the assumption talking. Answering it once will not be enough, but noticing it each time takes some of its power away.
Qur’an and Sunnah
We have honoured the children of Adam (Quran 17:70). The honour is stated as something given, before any question of what a person manages to achieve.
۞وَلَقَدۡ كَرَّمۡنَا بَنِيٓ ءَادَمَ وَحَمَلۡنَٰهُمۡ فِي ٱلۡبَرِّ وَٱلۡبَحۡرِ وَرَزَقۡنَٰهُم مِّنَ ٱلطَّيِّبَٰتِ وَفَضَّلۡنَٰهُمۡ عَلَىٰ كَثِيرࣲ مِّمَّنۡ خَلَقۡنَا تَفۡضِيلࣰ ا
We have honoured the children of Adam and carried them by land and sea; We have provided good sustenance for them and favoured them specially above many of those We have created
Qur’an 17:70read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Compassion focused therapy was built for people whose difficulties are bound up with high shame and heavy self criticism, and an early systematic review gathered what had been published on its benefits. Early is the operative word, since the review covers a small and varied set of studies. What it shows is that self criticism came to be treated as a target in its own right rather than a side issue.
Leaviss J, Uttley L. (2015). Psychotherapeutic benefits of compassion-focused therapy: an early systematic review.. Psychological medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
If effort is the only explanation available, every difficulty becomes evidence against you.
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
Manuals rename things. Paediatric bipolar became disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, whole categories were reshuffled to line up with the international classification, and none of it changed who anybody was.
The idea that attention problems are a moral failing is older than the diagnosis itself. An early medical name for this put it down to defective moral control, so if you grew up hearing that you simply were not trying, you were hearing an echo of that.
Sensing that you got something wrong socially, without knowing what, tends to turn into watching yourself constantly. That watching is usually what makes the next conversation go badly, not the original mistake.