8 reasons addiction carries a stigma

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 16:00:00 +0000

The American Society of Addiction Medicine characterizes addiction as a “primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry.” The National Institute on Drug Abuse defines addiction as a ‘chronic, relapsing brain disease” that changes the structure and functionality of the brain. So why do so many people still think of addiction as a moral failing? Why do they still refer to victims of substance misuse disorders as meth freaks, alcoholics, junkies, crackheads and garden-variety drunks?

The answer is simple as it is depressing: because that’s the way it’s always been. Addicts are scorned by communities and celebrities with addictions are exploited or hounded by paparazzi. And while the government purports to view addiction as a disease, it often works in opposition to that position through the “War on Drugs,” which counts most drug users as criminals. Even those of us in the treatment community still—consciously or unconsciously—employ stigmatizing programming and language—such as when we focus on “dirty” urine.

Redefining addiction

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 15:01:00 +0000

The proposed changes in the diagnostic criteria for addiction in the long-awaited DSM-5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, scheduled to be published next May, have proved unsettling to many in the treatment community. These largely professional disagreements assumed the status of a public controversy when a May 11 New York Timesarticle reported that Dr. Howard Moss of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism had resigned from the DSM-5 Task Force.

The controversy is hardly surprising. In many ways, writing a new DSMis a sisyphean task. Since psychiatric disorders don’t announce themselves with biological diagnostic data, the coherent organization of a huge number of complex disorders into a “manual” to be used by researchers, healthcare professionals and third-party payers is daunting. How do you capture, in a few pages, illnesses and patterns of suffering that manifest uniquely in every new patient? Consider also that many patients have more than one psychiatric illness and that diagnosis depends, to a certain extent, upon the patient’s own ability to articulate their inner experience. No revision to the DSM would be greeted with universal praise from a field increasingly polarized between viewing nature or nurture as the essential cause.

Salon.com > Dr. Richard Juman

8 reasons addiction carries a stigma

Redefining addiction