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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Getting assessed and diagnosed
Knowing that changes what you do about it. Counting calories and resolving to try harder both aim at willpower, which was never the mechanism in the first place. What tends to help more is arranging for the good feeling to arrive from somewhere else: food in the house you actually enjoy, eating before you are desperate, movement, sleep, company. Kinder, and better aimed.
My servants who have harmed yourselves by your own excess, do not despair of God's mercy (Quran 39:53). The address is to exactly the person who thinks they have gone too far to be met.
الزمر
۞قُلۡ يَٰعِبَادِيَ ٱلَّذِينَ أَسۡرَفُواْ عَلَىٰٓ أَنفُسِهِمۡ لَا تَقۡنَطُواْ مِن رَّحۡمَةِ ٱللَّهِۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ يَغۡفِرُ ٱلذُّنُوبَ جَمِيعًاۚ إِنَّهُۥ هُوَ ٱلۡغَفُورُ ٱلرَّحِيمُ
Say, ‘[God says], My servants who have harmed yourselves by your own excess, do not despair of God’s mercy. God forgives all sins: He is truly the Most Forgiving, the Most Merciful
Qur’an 39:53read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A systematic review of stigma and help-seeking found a small to moderate but consistent deterrent effect, with shame and fear of disclosure among the barriers people report most often. That is the finding that bears on this: it is a subject people keep to themselves. The review is about help-seeking rather than about food or reward, so it speaks to why the topic goes unraised, not to what the food is doing.
Clement S, Schauman O, Graham T, Maggioni F, Evans-Lacko S, Bezborodovs N, Morgan C, Rüsch N, Brown JS, Thornicroft G. (2015). What is the impact of mental health-related stigma on help-seeking? A systematic review of quantitative and qualitative studies.. Psychological medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
If the eating is regulating a mood, only something else that regulates the mood will take its place.
Disruptive mood dysregulation disorder was built partly to keep the bipolar label off children whose future nobody can yet see. Worth remembering when that word lands on a family's paperwork: it describes now, and it does not settle later.
How an outburst ends tells you more than how it starts. Give an ADHD storm some room and it often burns itself out. The rage that runs for an hour with the lights out behind the eyes is a different animal, and so is the child who genuinely does not mind what you take away.
It runs the other way as well. Among children referred for dyslexia, a sizeable minority also have ADHD and many have coordination difficulties too. Whatever is written on the referral, treat it as one part of the picture.