The information we provide is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. It should not be used in place of the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare providers. The debate on addiction has been ongoing for decades, with differing opinions on whether addiction is a disease or a choice. Some argue that addiction is a chronic, relapsing brain disease, while others believe it is a result of personal choices and behaviors. For example, organizations such as Alcoholics Anonymous address the issue of alcoholism as a moral decision or a mental illness, calling it a disease, but at the same time, asking members to work on shortcomings and defects of character. This blog post aims to explore both sides of the debate and debunk common misconceptions surrounding addiction.
Addiction is a disease: We must change our attitudes toward addicts
As predicted the subjects shifted to matching, lowering their overall reinforcement rate as they did so. This finding has been replicated numerous times (e.g., Herrnstein et al., 1997), and it is analogous as to what happens as drug use turns http://apachan.ru/colchek/?id=15850 into addiction. Indeed, the theoretical lines so closely approximated the observations that the simplest account is that each year a constant proportion of those who had not yet remitted did so regardless of how long they had been addicted.
Symptoms of Addiction
As soldiers left the strange mixture of fear, boredom, combat tensions, and poor living conditions of the battle zone in the early 1970s, the vast majority—95 percent, according to studies—left their addiction behind, despite opportunities to become readdicted. The Vietnam experience highlights the significant role that factors other than human biology and the nature of the addictive agent play in addiction. Environments and opportunities for other experiences matter—they also shape brain pathways of reward. They are critical https://altai-info.com/novosti/3442-obyavlen-vserossiyskiy-konkurs-moya-alternativa.html to helping those recovering from addiction find a new sense of purpose. The fact that addiction changes the way the brain works lends credibility to the idea of a lifelong disease, even though, according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, the changes are “persistent”—which is not the same as permanent. But turning addicts into patients keeps them from doing what is essential for recovery—discovering a personal goal deeply, individually meaningful and rewarding enough to satisfy the neural circuitry of desire.
The Ethics of Blaming and Punishing Individuals with Addiction
Does a person become locked into addiction because it is a choice that they are making and continue to make, or is it a disease that warps their brain and takes choice out of the equation? These are the two sides of the addiction debate, and which side wins plays a critical role in how medical professionals should approach addiction treatment. When someone first tries drugs or alcohol, it’s a decision they’ve made to ingest a certain substance. Some people believe that because of their decision to try a substance; they are now responsible for the way addiction can take control of the mind and body.
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A Non-Disease Etiology for Persistent Self-Destructive Drug Use
- Treatment for addiction can include a combination of therapy, medication-assisted treatment, and support groups.
- Suppose that a man’s mother dies, and he undergoes the agonizing trauma we call unbearable grief.
- In the addiction field, compulsive drug use typically refers to inflexible, drug-centered behavior in which substance use is insensitive to adverse consequences [100].
- What passes as clinical treatment for addiction is psychotherapy, which essentially consists of various forms of conversation or rhetoric (Szasz, 1988).
Diagnosis was stable in severe, treatment-seeking cases, but not in general population cases of alcohol dependence. Thus, as originally pointed out by McLellan and colleagues, most of the criticisms of addiction as a disease could equally be applied to other medical conditions [2]. This type of criticism could also be applied to other psychiatric disorders, and that has indeed been the case historically [23, 24]. Few, if any healthcare professionals continue to maintain that schizophrenia, rather than being a disease, is a normal response to societal conditions. Why, then, do people continue to question if addiction is a disease, but not whether schizophrenia, major depressive disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder are diseases?
Grief and Alcohol: What Is the Connection Between Grief and Alcohol Use?
This statement, while correct in pointing out broad heritability of behavioral traits, misses a fundamental point. The fact that normal anatomy shapes healthy organ function does not negate that an altered structure can contribute https://www.digiminds.com/thanksgiving-gift.html to pathophysiology of disease. Critics further state that a “genetic predisposition is not a recipe for compulsion”, but no neuroscientist or geneticist would claim that genetic risk is “a recipe for compulsion”.