u/RidleeRiddle

TW for anyone who is sensitive to topics of addiction.

Where I am from, the disease model has become very mainstream when addressing addiction within the past 20 or so years. A lot of people use this terminology loosely.

As a person who has grown up with a family plagued by both addicts and cancer victims/survivors, I am really sick of it and the way people talk about it.

I went onto study psych, and in my courses regarding mental illness and addicition, we learned to regard addiction as a maladaptive coping mechanism--NOT a disease in and of itself. My peers who went onto practice therapy (I ended up going into child development) still apply this framework to it rather than treating addiction itself as the disease. There often is an underlying issue related to mental illness and trauma, but addiction itself is a maladaptive cope, not the disease. Having an addiction doesn't make a person dieased and babying people about it is infantalizing.

Addicts will take any inch you give them and run the whole mile with it, accountability and constructive coping are key. If they feel like a poor soul lost to a disease, they will take advantage of that. This "addiction is a disease" nonsense reinforces learned helplessness. I have seen this in real time, up close, over and over and over again.

I get that many people are trying to combat stigma and shame by calling addiction a disease, but there is a better way to do this without stripping away the agency and infantalizing them.

Rephrasing it as a maladaptive cope allows us to address the actual trauma or disease that is influencing them to indulge this damaging behavior, recognizes the fact that addiction requires active participation, and reinforces a person's ability to change their actions.

And on a personal note, my biological father was/is an addict while my stepdad battled and survived cancer. I have lived life with an addict in my home and with a cancer victim/survivor in my home. It's a very different experience, the only thing in common is both of these issues made us broke as fuck.

It irks me to insenuate that my father was a victim of disease in the same light that my stepdad was. No. These are very different beasts. My stepdad with cancer did not actively steal rent/grocery money from our mom, beat me, and disappear for days--my stepdad was home everyday, trying his hardest to support us and be strong for my little sisters and I while wasting away between cancer and chemo. THAT is disease.

I know this opinion will hit a tender spot for a lot of people, it clearly does for me. There is nothing wrong with hating my opinion.

Edit: Formatting