addiction: disease or weakness

Addiction: Disease or Weakness. Based on your proximity to a person who has been considered an addict you may or may not have a perspective on today’s topic. When I say addict, I want to include alcoholics along with all forms of drug addiction. I think it’s important to make the term exclusive. At the end of the day it is a predisposition to knowingly use a substance that you are aware will most often kill.

What goes on in the mind of a person who sees their life completely falling apart and knows that their addiction is primarily the reason for it. I know that the addicts favorite friend is denial. Denial is an outward expression of inward guilt. Who wouldn’t deny having a problem that they are convinced they can’t stop. Once I say I have something, especially something as devastating as addiction, I am then responsible to do so.

The challenge with most addicts is that we are not response able. when a person goes from an occasional, to a periodic, to a regular frequency and graduating to a chronic condition mechanisms in the brain begin to change and per the American Society of Addictive Medicine it says that they suffer from a disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry. That takes us to another level of understanding addiction. it may start out as a person making bad choices.

The average person who makes a bad choice and sees a negative loss that they find value in would normally stop making that bad choice. They do not receive the same brain reward as the addict receives. Because of that, fat addiction is a documented disease far more than it ever is A simple weakness. Addicted people need help and often that help is hospitalization. Understanding the medical model of drug and alcohol addiction requires us to set aside certain prejudices and feelings of superiority.

Addiction is a disease and we need to treat it as such. I know that there are certain crimes and things that occur because of that and I’m not saying we don’t need to deal with those things as well. Until we treat the addictive person as a sick person trying to get well rather than a bad person trying to get better we will have very little success if any at all. If a person has cancer or diabetes or another medical condition, we wouldn’t tell them to go home and think about living better. We would treat them understanding the treatment that their disease requires. The same is true with the addict. I hope you’re blessed and have a wonderful day and I hope that this has shed some light on this often-asked question.

Robert is the Recovery Guy. Getting clean and sober on April 25, 1986 has given me the insight and practical skill set to not only stay sober, but to also re-invent myself to the person I always wanted to become. Showing others how to do this is my life goal.

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