the notion of self in the journey back from addiction

The notion of self in the journey back from addiction full#
The notion of self in the journey back from addiction free#

Stigma is a big concept, it is not just looking at people with addiction in a judgmental or negative way, it is also the broader social, political and economic processes that in many ways have fallen short in treating people with addiction.”Īccording to Fisher, addiction can also be a shared trauma through generations. “We also just generally struggle with treating all forms of mental suffering in a compassionate and helpful way, especially in the US but also in other parts of the world. “One of the historical legacies we are fighting against is that for quite a long time, the medical profession abdicated its responsibility to treat people with addiction.” Fisher writes how it wasn’t until 1941 that the US Public Health Service issued an important publication framing alcoholism as a public health problem rather than immoral behaviour. That can be dangerous, to make too many strong assumptions.”įisher points to the stigma around addiction as one reason why it appears so difficult to treat. When people are suffering, they tend to reach for a cause and want an explanation…I saw that mirrored on a social level too, when society is going through an addiction epidemic, like the opioid epidemic or the problems with alcohol a lot of people are facing during Covid, we want to know why.

The notion of self in the journey back from addiction full#

All of those things mattered but to attribute the addiction to one or the other cause is missing out on the full picture. “I don’t think I developed addiction because of my early childhood specifically, I don’t think I developed it because of genetics, I don’t think I developed it because of burnout during my medical school training. It is absolutely essential and, in a way, life-changing, to pause and to think about addiction as a multi-level phenomenon, one that exists at the individual, and neuroscientific level but also at the social, cultural and economic level.”įisher says he still finds it difficult to pinpoint any one reason for his own addiction. The problem is it is a double-edged sword and a fundamentally slippery concept. “Some people have found tremendous hope, clarity and comfort from the notion of addiction as a disease. With figures from the Health Research Board in Ireland showing an increase in alcohol and drug abuse, especially the use of cocaine, how we treat addiction demands increased scrutiny.įor example, in the book, Fisher also explores how labelling addiction as a disease isn’t always helpful. As Fisher writes, the thing that is terrifying to Susan, and to many others like her, is that they watch themselves making a choice even while feeling there is something wrong with the choice. And then I’m drinking again, and I just don’t know why or how,” she tells him. He cites the example of Susan, one of his patients who struggles to quit alcohol.

The notion of self in the journey back from addiction free#

However, Fisher argues that many people with addiction occupy a middle ground between free choice and total loss of control. It is only in more recent times that neuroscientists and advocates have proposed the counterargument that addictive behaviours are uncontrollable compulsions, and thus people with addiction deserve compassion and treatment, rather than punishment. “People have been struggling been with since the time of Aristotle, St Augustine and the Buddha….It is a really confusing and multi-faceted phenomenon and it is informative to see how people throughout history have struggled to put a name to it,” he says.įisher writes that by claiming that addictive behaviours are simply a kind of choice, people have justified punitive measures for centuries, from putting drunkards in the stocks to imprisoning people for drug possession. In the book, which was ten years in the making, Fisher writes about how he became convinced that medical science alone, while important, was insufficient for understanding addiction. While it wasn’t hard to decide to write the book, the process of writing about some of the most difficult moments of my life was a painful thing to revisit,” he says.

“I wanted to write the book to help me understand myself and my family and also the deeper I got into the history, the more I realised that ideas about addiction are influenced by our own family histories and our legacies, and the sort of cultural baggage we carry, good and bad. He explores his own journey - his parents were alcoholics - in tandem with a survey of the approaches that have been taken to understand and treat addiction over time. As he writes: “But did I have addiction? Was it a thing - something I caught, or that took hold of me - or was it inseparable from who I was, lurking there in my personality or biology or karma for all time?…And would I have it for the rest of my life, even if I never drank or used again?”įisher later went on to specialise in addiction and his work and his personal experience underpins his recent book The Urge: Our History of Addiction.