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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Shame and stigma
If you have old paperwork carrying a label nobody uses now, that is bookkeeping rather than a hidden verdict on you. What is worth your attention is how much of any label you have taken inside and started using against yourself. That part is not administrative at all.
Everyone does things their own way, but your Lord is fully aware of who follows the best-guided path (Quran 17:84). The knowing that counts is not held in any filing system.
الإسراء
قُلۡ كُلࣱّ يَعۡمَلُ عَلَىٰ شَاكِلَتِهِۦ فَرَبُّكُمۡ أَعۡلَمُ بِمَنۡ هُوَ أَهۡدَىٰ سَبِيلࣰ ا
Say, ‘Everyone does things their own way, but your Lord is fully aware of who follows the best-guided path.’
Qur’an 17:84read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Researchers validating a short ten item measure of internalised stigma found that scores on it go with more depression, and with lower self esteem, empowerment and sense of recovery. It is a measurement study, so it maps associations rather than showing what causes what. The useful part is that the inward version of a label is a real and measurable thing, unlike the filing category it came from.
Boyd JE, Otilingam PG, Deforge BR. (2014). Brief version of the Internalized Stigma of Mental Illness (ISMI) scale: psychometric properties and relationship to depression, self esteem, recovery orientation, empowerment, and perceived devaluation and discrimination.. Psychiatric rehabilitation journal doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The word on a form only carries the weight you hand it.
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.
Before you offer anyone the upside of their ADHD, say the hard part out loud first. One patient's answer to being told it was a gift was to ask where he could return it.
Some people will not believe this exists whatever you show them. You are allowed to give a short honest answer and then let the conversation go.