Addiction is a disease like any other victims of addiction needs your support and care stop discrimination and stigma towards them.
I strongly believe that where you are in your neighborhood or in your family you have come across someone suffering from a given illness. Depending on the magnitude of the problem at hand special considerations will be taken to help ease the pain and suffering of the patient. This is normally a common and positive gesture that we extend to sick people. To be more specific let us take cancer as an example. It will not go unnoticed the great concern people will have if one of their friends or relative has been diagnosed with cancer. All the family members will express their sympathetic gasps of concern and be around the patient trying to find out the treatment options and the very detail information related to the significance of the diagnosis. Alongside all this special dedication to prayers, get well cards flowers will be sent to the patient all too express sympathy and concern.
Addiction, just like cancer, is a fatal disease the only difference is how it has been stigmatized and this is a huge source of hindrance for many to understand it and give the victims the kind of support they may need.
Unfortunately addiction being a mental illness, garnering the support of others can be taxing and difficult. Majority do not understand mental illness to the degree that they understand and relate to illnesses based in physiological malfunctions. Mental illness does not come in a package seared with scars, a cast on a leg, or intravenous feeding tubes protruding from the victim’s wrists and to the nose. People suffering from this problem normally tends to be secretive and make all efforts to hide the true diagnosis from everyone and more so to their employers. Because emotions couple with mismanagement of a mental illness or lack of proper treatment put together necessitate that the patient be a way from the employment environment. In some cases, the need to be away may present itself with greater urgency than the individual’s physically ill appears due to the stigma surrounding addiction.
In recent years, negative ideas and connotations surrounding addiction have definitely improved, particularly since the earlier part of the century. Alcoholics are no longer sent off to psychiatric wards and mental institutions; a breadth of knowledge on the subject is readily available. Scientific and psychiatric communities alike recognize alcoholism as a legitimate disease. Treatment methods include regular attendance at 12-step meetings, forming a relationship with a higher power, reaching out to others in a support network, and staying active in one’s recovery. The biggest success stories boast stories of a renowned sense of spirituality. In terms of addiction, the plight is the same. Drug addicts recover from a debilitating addiction through spiritual means; by reaching out for help; and by being accountable to a group of individuals who have trudged the same road. However, knowledge based in the recovery process from both addiction and alcoholism is often limited to specialists in the relevant fields or family members of addicts and alcoholics only.
One of the barriers preventing afflicted individuals from seeking addiction treatment lies in the stigma surrounding addiction. Addiction stigma is directly correlated with the language frequently used to describe addiction-related topics. Addicts suffer from low self-esteem. They become withdrawn and isolate in their bedrooms anything to avoid being out in public or immersed in social situations. They want to stop, but find they cannot. Terminology that perpetuates the stigma of addiction only serves to intensify these deep-seated negative feelings. For example, the following list is inclusive of terminology that exacerbates an addict’s sense of guilt, shame, and isolation:
- Calling an addict a “junkie” or an “abuser” doing so leaves no discrepancy between the human being and their disease; implies a lack of will power or character.
- Drug Abuse in general, addicts abuse drugs; but using the term “abuse” can have long-term negative effects, due to the connotation of the term. It attributes the disease of addiction solely to the individual, ignoring environmental and genetic predispositions.
- Referring to an addict’s test results as “dirty” causes the addict to feel filthy; unclean; undeserving of love and support.
- Claiming that an addict “has a drug habit” doing so evades the medical assessment of addiction; negates the fact that addiction is characterized by a physical allergen, a mental preoccupation, and a spiritual sickness.
- Labeling an addict a “user” leaves the addict feeling shameful, alone and a supposed drain on society’s resources; can also be misleading due to its part in describing individuals who have experimented with drugs but not necessarily suffered from a full-blown addiction.
- Over time, we encourage the general public to conduct further research on the disease of addiction. Through increased access to addiction information, and factual awareness on the subject, individuals will learn to replace terms like “junkie” in describing an addict seeking recovery services with “a patient undergoing treatment for a substance misuse disorder”.
The media is not doing much to help solve the problem of addiction stigmatization either. Today nearly all the different forms of media outlets are full of negativities in relation to addiction, the kind of movies, television shows etc. does not highlight the effects of addiction in a dignified way as they do to other illnesses like cancer which we looked earlier. This is one campaign that the civil society and all likeminded people should involve in to bring about the much needed change of attitude towards addiction as a disease.
Learning institutions is another avenue which can be very helpful in the fight against stigma and to recognize addiction as a serious disease of which like any other disease needs professional care and treatment. This can be done by incorporating the use of non-stigmatizing terms such as:
- Harmful use of drugs and not “reckless use of drugs”
- Hazardous drug use
- Risky drug use
- Substance free rather than “dirty” when referring to drug-free screening results
- Replacing “user” with “person involved in risky substance used”
- Medically monitored treatment regimen as an alternative to the term “substitution therapy” which refers to the addicts receiving counter-indicative drugs throughout the detoxification process; inaccurately describes addicts prescribed antidepressants in early sobriety
- Instead of “drug habit” use terms such as “an individual engaged in active addiction”, or an individual suffering from “a substance misuse disorder”
In all this experiences we as a society have a duty to offer care and support to those suffering from addiction. In bid to offer the much needed care and support doctor Akoury founded AWAREmed Health and Wellness Resource Center a facility which is fully dedicated on offering solution while focusing on Neuroendocrine Restoration (NER) to reinstate normality through realization of the oneness of Spirit, Mind, and Body, Unifying the threesome into ONE. These are the kind of people we need to fight and eradicate stigma completely. If you ask me to recommend for you someone with great experience on addiction and much more I would not hesitate to recommend doctor Dalal Akoury, oh wait a minute I just did. Go for it friend and live your life to the fullest.
