Virtually every time I read an online article or blog about addiction and its effects on relationships - and readers are invited to comment - I see the same statement - always by different people, but the choice of words is eerily the same. They stridently proclaim:
Addiction is not a disease, it's a choice!
Sometimes this opinion is accompanied by dismissive comments about people who've made the choice to use drugs or drink too much alcohol - but always the core belief is that those people are stupid, weak, morally corrupt and generally not worth the time it takes to vilify them. The commenters also make it clear that the 'disease model' is abhorrent because it absolves weak and morally corrupt people from personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions - it absolves their useless and irresponsible parents to boot.
I must confess that I don't follow their logic. I ask myself: how does one compare a disease to a choice?
Of course using alcohol or other drugs is a choice. What else could it be? Using alcohol and other drugs compulsively, repeatedly, chronically, dangerously, thoughtlessly and sometimes fatally is always a choice.
But that doesn't make addiction - or whatever other name the illness goes by: alcoholism, chemical dependency - not a disease.
Sorry, I don't get the connection between a person making a choice to do something and that choice negating their illness.
The choice itself is sick. And it is incidental to the illness.
It's like saying the choice to smoke cigarettes means a person with lung cancer doesn't really have lung cancer.
Again, I must confess that I'm bewildered. Is there something I'm missing that would provide a logical conclusion to this widely-held belief that seems so nonsensical to me?
It is a belief that is, after all, at the core of how we treat chemical dependency and its devastating effects on families, communities and societies.
It is a belief that prevents healing at all kinds of levels
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