Don’t ostracise drugs users – empathise with them: Dr Gabor Maté was recently awarded the Order of Canada for his work on trauma and addiction. The following is adapted from his book ‘In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction’: 1/37 #March4Justice
“From Abraham to the Aztecs, ancient cultures exacted human sacrifices to appease the gods – that is, to soothe their own anxieties and to placate false beliefs. Today, we have our own version of this, as evidenced by the overdose crisis sweeping North America. 2/37
These lost lives are offered up, we might say, for the appeasement of our own false beliefs and denial. Addicted people are victimised by our society’s disinclination to come to terms with the root sources, psychology and neurobiology of addiction, 3/37
especially of substance dependence. We could stem the fatal tide, end the sacrificial cycle, if we grasped what drug use is really all about, recognised the universality of addictions throughout our culture and adopted practices that reflected reality rather than prejudice: 4/37
In other words, if, instead of ostracising drug users, we grounded our approach in science and empathy. 5/37
These “ifs” have never been more urgent than now, and not only because of opioids and other substances of addiction. The World Health Organization has declared “gaming disorder” to be a significant threat to mental health and social functioning. 6/37
Need we mention the devastating prevalence of addictive overeating, sexual compulsion, pathological gambling or shopping? Or the lethality of perfectly legal habits such as
cigarette smoking or excessive drinking. 7/37
We shame and marginalise drug users to camouflage our discomfort with the broad reach of addiction in our culture. The essence of all addictive habits was succinctly expressed by former heroin user, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards: 8/37
“It was a search for oblivion, I suppose, though not intentionally,” he writes. “The convolutions you go through just not to be you for a few hours.” 9/47
Why are people so uncomfortable in their own skins that they need to escape themselves, even at the risk of self-harm? What engenders such unbearable pain in human beings that they would knowingly risk their very lives to escape it? 10/37
“We need to talk about what drives people to take drugs,” the famed trauma psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk has said, pointing out that there is almost a direct correlation between childhood trauma and addiction. 11/37
“People that feel good about themselves don’t do things that endanger their bodies… Traumatised people feel agitated, restless, tight in chest. You hate the way you feel. They take drugs in order to stabilise their bodies.” 12/37
“I’m not going to ask you what you were addicted to,” I often say to people, “nor when, nor for how long. Only –whatever your addiction – what did you like about it? What, in the short term, did it give you that you craved so much?” 13/37
Universally, the answers are: “It helped me escape emotional pain… it numbed me… helped me deal with stress… gave me peace of mind… a sense of connection with others… a sense of control.” 14/37
Such responses illuminate that addiction is neither a choice nor primarily a disease, genetic or acquired. It originates in a person’s attempt to solve genuine human problems: those of emotional loss, of overwhelming stress, of lost connection. 15/37
Hence my mantra: the first question is not, “Why the addiction?” but “Why the pain?” In my 12 years of work in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the answer could not have been more stark. Every single one of my female patients had suffered sexual abuse as a child. 16/47
None of my patients – male or female – had been spared major trauma of some kind. Not all addictions stem from such severe hurt, but all are rooted in sorrow, helplessness, and alienation. 17/37
“Even the most harmful addictions serve a vital adaptive function for dislocated individuals,” Bruce Alexander writes in his seminal work, The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in the Poverty of the Spirit. 18/47
“Only severely dislocated people are vulnerable to addiction.” By dislocation he means “an enduring lack of psychosocial integration.” Whether we call it dislocation or trauma, there is no effective way of addressing addiction without addressing its fundamental origins. 19/37
As a society we are far from embracing this inescapable truth, in face of all the scientific, narrative and epidemiological evidence for it. 20/37
Forty years ago, I graduated from medical school at the University of British Columbia without ever, in four years, hearing a single mention of psychological trauma and its impact on human health and development. 21/37
Disturbingly, nor do most medical students even today, despite the voluminous and persuasive research linking trauma to mental and physical illness and addiction. 22/37
“What the data look like is a society gripped by despair, with a surge of unhealthy behaviours and an epidemic of drugs,” the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman wrote in The New York Times back in 2015. The situation has only grown more dire since then. 23/37
How are we to address the manifestations of despair without addressing the despair itself? How are health practitioners to help people when they themselves remain ignorant – by training! – of the source of the problems their patients present with, 24/37
when academia and major treatment institutions have yet to absorb the new knowledge? How, in the absence of awareness is the legal system to address addiction? How is the political system to confront it rationally? 25/37
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