Conversation

Was recently reminded of the ubiquity of the sentence "[person] is only doing it for attention" in care contexts and how deeply I hate it. It is almost always used as a justification for cruelty. It dismisses the distress that person is in, serving as an excuse not to do anything about it. But it is also hiding how *even if* the person was actually primarily doing "it" "for attention", attention itself is a legitimate need that people in institutions of care are often profoundly deprived of.