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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Getting assessed and diagnosed
A father who is not the father, a sibling nobody mentioned, a donor conception no one planned to explain: these arrive by email on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. Ask what they would want to do if something like that came back, and who they would tell first. Ten minutes of thinking beforehand is worth a great deal afterwards.
The believers are described as those who 'conduct their affairs by mutual consultation' (Quran 42:38). Deciding a thing like this in company rather than alone is named as an ordinary habit, not an extra precaution.
الشورى
وَٱلَّذِينَ ٱسۡتَجَابُواْ لِرَبِّهِمۡ وَأَقَامُواْ ٱلصَّلَوٰةَ وَأَمۡرُهُمۡ شُورَىٰ بَيۡنَهُمۡ وَمِمَّا رَزَقۡنَٰهُمۡ يُنفِقُونَ
respond to their Lord; keep up the prayer; conduct their affairs by mutual consultation; give to others out of what We have provided for them
Qur’an 42:38read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
The nearest evidence here is about disclosure rather than about testing. A systematic review of stigma and help seeking found a small to moderate but consistent deterrent effect on seeking help, with shame and fear of being found out among the most commonly reported barriers. It was not studying genetic testing, so it is a reason to assume a family secret will be hard to carry anywhere, rather than a finding about what these kits do to people.
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.
A shock you have already imagined lands on someone who has somewhere to put it.
If someone is already in crisis, this is not the season to go looking for more.
When a bright, talkative autistic child arrives looking mainly behavioural, look underneath for a coordination or reading difficulty. Once the first label is in place, whatever comes after tends to get filed under it and never assessed on its own.
Strategies for ADHD are visible. A timer on the table, a list on the wall, an alarm going off in a meeting. If someone has not yet made peace with having ADHD, each of those is an announcement, and it will quietly get dropped.
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.