Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Shame and stigma
A man in a support group said his sisters can arrive two hours late to a family barbecue and nobody comments, while he is ten minutes late and everyone starts. That is unfair, and the noticing is also real.
Holding both at once is the only position that goes anywhere. Hold only the unfairness and you get to be right while nothing changes. Hold only the reputation and you are back to agreeing that you are the problem. Together it sounds like this: they watch me more closely than they watch my sisters, there is a history behind that, and the next barbecue is still one I can turn up early to.
Qur’an and Sunnah
He will not call you to account for oaths you have uttered unintentionally, but He will call you to account for what you mean in your hearts (Quran 2:225). Intention and effect are held apart there, which is the distinction your relatives are not making and you can still keep hold of.
لَّا يُؤَاخِذُكُمُ ٱللَّهُ بِٱللَّغۡوِ فِيٓ أَيۡمَٰنِكُمۡ وَلَٰكِن يُؤَاخِذُكُم بِمَا كَسَبَتۡ قُلُوبُكُمۡۗ وَٱللَّهُ غَفُورٌ حَلِيمࣱ
He will not call you to account for oaths you have uttered unintentionally, but He will call you to account for what you mean in your hearts. God is most forgiving and forbearing
Qur’an 2:225read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review of experimental research on being excluded found that social exclusion feeds the development and persistence of psychiatric difficulties and is bound up with their stigma. Being the one singled out at family gatherings is not a small social cost. The studies use brief staged exclusions in laboratories, so they point at a mechanism rather than measuring family life.
Reinhard MA, Dewald-Kaufmann J, Wüstenberg T, Musil R, Barton BB, Jobst A, Padberg F. (2020). The vicious circle of social exclusion and psychopathology: a systematic review of experimental ostracism research in psychiatric disorders.. European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Accepting both leaves you with something to do, where either one on its own leaves you stuck.
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
ADD and ADHD are not two different things. ADD is the older public word for what is now called ADHD, inattentive type, and the quieter presentation is not a lighter version of it.
If your version of this is fog, slowness and drifting off rather than restlessness, you are not a half case. Researchers are still arguing about whether that pattern is a subtype or something of its own.
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.