Except it was. Absolutely. I was an addict, I am an addict, I have now accepted, very happily, that I will always be an addict. There is little that separates me from the drug user in the dark alley and the drunk on the park bench other than the great fortune of having made it to recovery, and I have learned that it is arrogant to assume that I would not end up in said alley or on said bench if I returned. to take a drink or a drug. Because addiction, as I have learned, is an elevator that goes down: you can choose to get off at any floor, but if you go back up, you will only go down, deeper and deeper into the bowels of a disease that is still much deeper. maligned in a world that considers itself mental health literate.
Today marks the start of Addiction Awareness Week, which has been launched with a moving message from the Princess of Wales, who is the patron saint of the charity. action on addiction. She talks about addiction as a misunderstood mental illness, a mental illness so misunderstood that even people who suffer from it often refuse to admit they have it. While we now happily accept without judgment that people experience depression and anxiety, addiction is still seen as a kind of moral failing. We criminalize the people who suffer from it and consider them the architects of their own ruin.
And yet, increasingly, experts see addiction as a maladaptation, a surprising brain reaction to trauma. Gabor Maté, a Hungarian-Canadian doctor considered an expert in the field after years of working with some of the most drug-dependent people on the planet, believes that addiction is a response to human suffering. What addicts need is not judgment, but help to heal from their experiences. The belief that addicts are weak or ethically challenged not only fails addicts themselves, but society as a whole.
I interviewed Maté for a special episode of my podcast Mad World, on the occasion of Addiction Awareness Week. He explained to me that all of us, to some degree, are addicted now, just that we have become addicted to things that are considered socially acceptable, like work or sugar.
Technology, as he points out, feeds on the addictive process: our phones have been expressly designed to make us dependent on them, the act of checking messages or social networks works on the same brain receptors as cocaine. And arguably the most addictive drug of all is not heroin or crack, but alcohol, a substance readily available on supermarket shelves, packaged and sold as palatable despite the fact that just last week, the British Liver Trust warned of a 40 percent increase in liver cancer cases in the last decade, a statistic that worries him is due to our ‘wine o’clock’ culture. Alcohol is the answer to almost everything in the UK, so why do we look down on people who then become addicted?
Viewed in these terms, shaming someone for their addiction is a bit like judging the Pope for being Catholic, or a bear for defecating in the woods. Instead of seeing it as a flaw, perhaps it would be better to see it as a condition that is at the very heart of being human. And if we learn to understand addiction, instead of dismissing it, we will all be much better off with it.
Gabor Maté speaks with Bryony Gordon for a special edition of her Mad World mental health podcast, to mark Addiction Awareness Week. Listen to the full interview for free using the player at the top of this article, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app.
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