Addiction is a disease?

[SNOWBALL138]

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When people say addiction is a disease without a cure, do they mean this literally or is it metaphorical?


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Both. I can't speak for all addictions, but scientists believe that alcoholics have a genetic predisposition toward their addiction. Whether this makes their alcoholism inevitable from birth is not known.

What is known is that no alcoholic is ever cured of his disease. There are no ex-alcoholics, only recovering alcholics. The only solution is to abstain.

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Thats all just AA mumbo-jumbo.

[SNOWBALL138]

Discussions based around semantics are almost universally stupid.

[noggindoc]

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Greetings,

Thank you for the replies to my perspective on labels of 'mental illness' and 'addictive diseases.' First of all, let me respond to a poster who replied:

"Yes, crazy people are just stubborn. Do you really believe this crap? Here's a question for you - why do you think people make those bad decisions?"


The poster starts off with a personal attack, completely irrelevant to the truth value of my premises. Whether or not my idea seems counterintuitive, unexpected, socially unacceptable, incredible, silly, contrary to popular opinion does not matter. Ironically, he/she professes that people afflicted with 'mental illness' or 'addictive illness' have real diseases then he refers to them as 'crazy?' I wouldn't call somebody with cancer or diabetes 'bizarre or zany.' I wonder why he would chose this socially stigmatizing description for helpless victims of "true diseases."

Ok, now you ask me why people make bad decisions. First of all, what you consider 'bad' will hinge on your value system as to what constitutes 'bad.' Lets assume 'bad' means resulting in undesireable consequences. Here is my basic answer. People make bad decisions because people are inherently flawed creatures prone to doing stupid things. More specificially, people's behaviors are a function of their beliefs about things. For example, lets assume I believe that I must have the approval of everybody I meet. Let assume you indicate you don't approve of me and my goofy ideas regarding "mental illness." What is the likely result? I will likely have a negative cognitive-emotive consequence in light of my belief about needing universal approval.

You see, I believe people and things do not disturb us; rather we disturb ourselves by believing they CAN disturb us. I belief we needlessly disturb ourselves (often in very severe ways) by allowing inflexible and irrational ideologies to guide our thinking. You are not depressed because you lost your job; you are depressed because you believe losing your job is all-important.

"And another question - have you ever known a person with a serious mental illness? I mean severe psychotic/anxiety/dissociative disorders, OCD and schizophrenia and the like. And have you ever been close to someone with a relatively "minor" mental illness?

I'll be the first to admit the line can be hard to draw, and the DSM is a rather poor piece of work. I also think treatment recommendations have a tendency to be drug-heavy and questionable. But no such thing as mental illness? That's absurd."




BTW, I will risk subjecting myself to the psychoanalytic fallacy and confess I have been diagnosed with a 'mental illness.' Specifically, panic disorder, OCD, Aspergar's disorder and bipolar disorder. In my early twenties I was involuntarily committed and have met hundreds of people with both brain diseases and problems in living.

I used to buy into the medical model of mental illness and felt like a hopeless victim of brain chemistry disequilibrium. It was very empowering when I stumbled upon Rational Emotive Behavioral Psychology. REBT enabled me to appreciate the role my goofy and rigid ideologies played in perpetuating my own self-defeating behaviors and irrational ideas (which many call 'mental illness').

I personally think labels of mental illness are not helpful for most people. Many people become the personification of their 'disease' and capitulate, assuming a victim role. Also, labels of mental illness are stigmatizing and hurt people in terms of employment, education, social advancement, and consitutional rights. Generally, I don't think people are served well by these labels.

I never stated that I believed brain disease didn't exist. Now that would be a difficult position to defend. To reiterate, I don't believe 'mental illness' literally exists. To say a mind is all is analogous to saying society is disease; an abuse of language. The mind a hypothetical construct, a concoction, an invention, a means of explanation. True disease like diabetes has a concrete referant.

JeffreyREBT 'Wherein I don't promise to make you rich without trying; or even trying very hard; I do promise to say things that will make you feel rich."

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Jeffrey,
I'm happy that cognitive behavioral ideas and techniques have been helpful to you. It sounds like many of the principles have helped you to overcome a few rather significant mental disorders (or whatever we'd like to call them I don't want to get into the semantics debate right now). Obviously one characterstic of both Asperger's and OCD is rigidity. And it sounds like REBT has helped elucidate some of the rigidity in your thinking. But I think if you'll use what you've learned you will see that your thinking continues to be rigid in some areas. Interesting that someone with two diagnoses that tend to involve rigid and overly concrete thinking would say that he doesn't "believe" in mental illness because it has no solid or observable referent like diabetes. You sound like an infomercial for REBT. It has been shown to be effective, no doubt. There is solid research backing for this approach. However, meta-analytic studies have shown many forms of therapy to be effective. REBT is not the only effective way to do therapy (I know you didn't say that specifically don't worry).

It also sounds like the issue of "labels" for mental disorders brings up personal issues for you because you were diagnosed with several. Again, I ask you to try to see that these labels are helpful in certain situations. I agree, they can sometimes be damaging. But they were created for reasons and many of them are helpful. The field of psychology and psychiatry would be crippled without the use of these "labels." Clinical research for both therapy and medication would be nearly impossible without labels or diagnoses. This in and of itself is a strong argument for the need for diagnoses as even the treatment you advocate so much for (REBT) would not exist without it. I could go on but this is already too long winded.

From what I hear, withdrawal is the pussy part. I have spoken with quite a few physical addicts, and the universal consensus has been that it's much much harder to handle the psychological element.

If you want to call addicts bitches, that's your prerogative. But to claim that it's somehow different based on whether the substance is physically addicting is pure ignorance.

The lack of knowledge (ignorance) of a lot of the posters in this thread is apparent to anyone who has ever been addicted to something or directly involved with someone who has. They're not stupid. They just don't have any firsthand knowledge.

I've never heard anyone say that kindness is a disease, they call it a good habit.

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I've never heard anyone say that kindness is a disease, they call it a good habit.

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Shame it's not contagious, at least. In spite of the old saying.

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The most current research on addiction, from a neuroscience perspective, is that many of the addictions that you consider to be non-physical in nature (gambling, sex, etc.) actually do have strong physical roots.

That is to say-- the neurochemical responses of a gambler when gambling is very similar to that of an alcoholic or drug addict.

So in fact--- gambling or eating or any of these other complusive behaviors which you consider to be only for "bitches", appear-- at least at the moment-- to have the same components (physical and pyschological) as those types of addictions reserved for "men".

[SheetWise]

If you're going to do any serious research into addiction or addictive personalities, you're going to have to add a study of spontaneous remission. I think you'll find it's responsible for "curing" more people than any of the "treatment" programs for drugs/alcohol/sex etc. (one reason it's rarely mentioned by those invested in the "treatment" industry, such as AMA). You'll also have to look at the methodology for determining "success" and use it as a guideline for selecting a control group to make a comparative analysis, since very few studies supply their own control groups (with good reason, if they're looking for funding). Most of what is accepted as "fact" in the disease/cure model, such as the idea that addicts cannot use their drug of choice responsibly or recreationally, should be seen as what it really is -- good advice, not science.

[DCWildcat]

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If you're going to do any serious research into addiction or addictive personalities, you're going to have to add a study of spontaneous remission. I think you'll find it's responsible for "curing" more people than any of the "treatment" programs for drugs/alcohol/sex etc. (one reason it's rarely mentioned by those invested in the "treatment" industry, such as AMA). You'll also have to look at the methodology for determining "success" and use it as a guideline for selecting a control group to make a comparative analysis, since very few studies supply their own control groups (with good reason, if they're looking for funding). Most of what is accepted as "fact" in the disease/cure model, such as the idea that addicts cannot use their drug of choice responsibly or recreationally, should be seen as what it really is -- good advice, not science.

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It's a huge ethical breach to have a control group in an addiction setting. Two groups addicted to heroin, and we withold treatment for one group? No. The best you can do is attempt different treatment measures over a huge sample of addicts and measure the relative success of them. In other words, you can compare the relative success of treatments, but you can't compare treatment to non-treatment.

Remission isn't a fault of current treatment problems, its an unfortunate barrier. Treating any addiction is difficult because (depending on the addiction) it often only takes one use to destroy everything the treatment has done, and this is universal for all forms of treatment.