Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Shame and stigma
Where a family or a community treats mental health care as shameful, a young person can spend a decade struggling with nobody's permission to ask for help. What arrives with that first appointment is not only the assessment. It is years of stored up failure stories that need unpicking as well, and that second part often takes longer than the first.
Do not despair of God's mercy (Quran 12:87). Jacob says it after years in which nothing had gone right, which is close to the position of anyone who has waited a long time for help.
يوسف
يَٰبَنِيَّ ٱذۡهَبُواْ فَتَحَسَّسُواْ مِن يُوسُفَ وَأَخِيهِ وَلَا تَاْيۡـَٔسُواْ مِن رَّوۡحِ ٱللَّهِۖ إِنَّهُۥ لَا يَاْيۡـَٔسُ مِن رَّوۡحِ ٱللَّهِ إِلَّا ٱلۡقَوۡمُ ٱلۡكَٰفِرُونَ
My sons, go and seek news of Joseph and his brother and do not despair of God’s mercy- only disbelievers despair of God’s mercy.’
Qur’an 12:87read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A systematic review gathered what adolescent boys and young men say gets in the way of seeking help for mental health difficulties, and what makes it easier, in a group with high suicide rates and low use of services. Barriers of this kind were reported consistently rather than rarely. The review covers perceptions, so it describes obstacles as people experience them rather than measuring what removing them would achieve.
Sheikh A, Payne-Cook C, Lisk S, Carter B, Brown JSL. (2025). Why do young men not seek help for affective mental health issues? A systematic review of perceived barriers and facilitators among adolescent boys and young men.. European child & adolescent psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Years of struggling without an explanation leave their own mark, separate from the condition itself.
If asking for an assessment would put you at risk at home, talk it through first with somebody outside the family, such as a GP or a student counsellor.
By the time somebody comes for an assessment, the poor opinion of themselves is usually decades old. Assume it is there even when the person in front of you is visibly doing well.
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.
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.