Awhile back the Washington Post ran an excellent article by Maia Szalavitz entited, “So, What Made Me an Addict? Experts Debate Whether Disease or Defect Is to Blame.”
This question is so crucial to how we treat persons suffering from both addiction and mental disorders, and especially how we deal with those with dual-diagnoses.
Just after I was discharged from Johns Hopkins Hospital, a friend of mine strongly encouraged me to go away to a halfway house of sorts for three or more months … where they treat addicts primarily, and some persons battling mental illness … in order to allow time to heal.
I ran it by my doctor. Did she think three months of AA meetings and yoga and group therapy would pull me out of my depression?
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Anything from Scientific America 1982 is surely out of date, neuroscience has proved other reasons since…update from them? I would imagine that it’s not possible for an addiction to be purely one thing, it has to be a combination of reasons.
Addiction cannot be be a purely physiological process only, genetics, environment, stressors etc all have to play their part in the mind-body connection. The most interesting thing to me about this post was the fact that the author stated that the drug use arose out of a need to “relieve social isolation”. What about painful emotions that are a huge part of social isolation? and then having the deep desire NOT to feel those emotions. For me there’s always been something missing from the disease or defect argument…am reading Candace Pert’s “Molecules of Emotions” – for me it’s definitely part of the missing piece.