Most People with Addiction Simply Grow Out of It
substance.com
substance.com
During my high school years, I suffered a bad accident. My right forearm was pretty much shattered, almost amputated. For about a week after all the surgeries, I was on Vicodin 24/7. Just from that, I was addicted. The withdrawal was miserable, and obviously came at the worst possible time.
That one week with Vicodin continues to have profound effects on my life, even now that I'm in my 30s. My fear of addiction convinced me to stay away from all drugs and even drinking. I socialized with people who didn't drink, and found activities that didn't involve partying. All of my social groups and hobbies, to this day, are the legacy of my total adult sobriety. I can't even imagine who I'd be if I didn't have that awful experience with Vicodin.
Do one-time alcoholics - functional or otherwise - who have sought treatment and then completely quit drinking for a fair number of years, ever manage to go back to moderate & responsible alcohol consumption?
or
Is it pretty much a life of teetotalism, for them, after that?
Do you know of any friends or family who have recovered and enjoy alcohol responsibly?
My experience has been that almost all such people I know, resort to drinking non-alcohol fizzy drinks, fruit juices and other replacements, but never any booze, not even non-alcoholic beer.
I'm addicted to substances that haven't been invented yet... and my brain really enjoys being wasted... the Ramones "I wanna be sedated" pretty well sums it up.
So for someone like me, mind altering substances are dangerous because I have no brakes... even after years of being stopped... because I really don't want to "enjoy alcohol responsibly".... I want to enjoy alcohol irresponsibly.
But don't take my words for it. I'd like to quote from a blog post of Nic Sheff:
"Going into it, I figured that most of the stories would be like mine. But in interviewing these different addicts —addicts that have worked with some of the top addiction specialists in the country— I was surprised to find that quite a few of them have now, after an extended period of abstinence, been able to go back to drinking or smoking pot casually without spiraling out of control again.
It was a baffling revelation to me.
[...]
Take the example of the crystal meth addict I mentioned above. His drug use really skyrocketed around the time he was diagnosed with HIV.
[...]
There was a direct connection between his environmental circumstances and his using, a concept that I’d never actually experienced. I used for no reason at all. But he had a reason."
http://www.thefix.com/content/alcoholic-versus-problem-drink...
I don't think there is something like having no reason but he probably knows himself the best. You should check him out if you don't already know him, he wrote 2 books about his teenage meth addiction and his struggle for recovery.
I'm now in my 30s, have a family and haven't touched a drug like that since. I tried smoking marijuana a few times in my 20s but no longer enjoyed it--all it did was make me extremely paranoid and withdrawn, and I felt hung over the next day.
These days I drink moderately. I have a glass of wine with dinner but never get drunk (nor have any desire to). I never go out to bars, never drink hard liquor, etc. A couple beers or glasses of wine is as far as it goes.
I believe my drug addiction was primarily caused by a miserable, unstable and abusive home life growing up. I had no way of coping other than escape and self-destruction. Once I was independent and out the house there was no longer a need for any of it. I'm profoundly grateful I lived through that period and I have a lot of empathy for children and teenagers who go down the road of addiction. I believe firmly that it is a failure in parenting, although not necessarily intentional on the part of the parents. Children need stability, love and structure.
> Do one-time alcoholics - functional or otherwise - who
> have sought treatment and then completely quit drinking
> for a fair number of years, ever manage to go back to
> moderate & responsible alcohol consumption?
* Been a long time since I gave up smoking. I think I could smoke every day for a month, and then stop again with it only being a medium-sized deal. Smoked for 7 years, ending up about 30 a day by the end.
* I gave up drinking just a few years ago. I have been given alcoholic drinks without knowing it on three occasions (and found out later), and it just wasn't a big deal at all. If I chose to have a drink, I think it'd take me many years to stop again. I am unsure if I will be able to sensibly drink again - I have a vague goal that I'll attempt it again in 10 years' time. I LOVE non-alcoholic beer
Part of the problem was that the first time I quit I was mentally happy, part of the problem was I knew "how easy" it was to quit the first time and this excuse makes it easier to spark up while you drink.
Now that I'm off them for good again I'm much more scared of them than I was before.
I did, but I've no idea how common that is. I had a fairly bad drinking problem in my early 20s. Very much the functional alcoholic. Once I kicked that (with a year or so of pretty close to abstinence — through personal choice, no programme) I went back to social drinking fine. Not had a problem since, which is about 20 odd years now.
I have a few rules of thumb (I generally don't have alcohol in the house past a decent bottle of whisky every month or so, and I don't drink alone) but sticking to them has never been hard, and the times I don't stick to 'em haven't cause a relapse and slide into doom.
With that said, I think that most severe alcoholics can never go back to drinking. The damage has been done, and they will always have that vulnerability. They may be able to control it for a while, even a surprisingly long time, but, if they go back to drinking or using then they will be thoroughly screwed.
There are people who may have issues that look like alcoholism, but are really different, like ADHD or depression. As those other issues get better, then the alcoholism will become less of a problem. For example, people with ADHD tend to have problems with impulse control. As people live their lives they learn that poor impulse control is, indeed, a real problem and they learn how to get it under control more-or-less on their own. That same lack of impulse control is disastrous when combined with alcohol. But, as their impulse control gets better, their problems with alcohol get easier, too.
Some people simply have had a crappy childhood, and, as they get more distance and grow out of those issues, then their tendency to addiction gets less.
As a side note, most alcoholics I’ve met advised me never to drink while at home. I never had any problem with drinking in my life, actually I can’t even understand how people get addicted to it in the first place since if I drink a lot I can’t function in a proper way, but I’ve followed that advice like it’s a small pearl of wisdom.
On the other hand, as someone who was addicted to nicotine I totally concur with the article. One morning I decided to quit it cold turkey and aside from the fact that the withdrawal phase was quite severe, I never looked back after it. I’m 8 years now free from cigarettes and I don’t miss them at all.
I would definitely consider myself being 'addicted' in that sense when I smoked pot.
I didn't get any joy out of recreational activities I was engaging in unless I was high first. I always felt like like the buzz wasn't as good as it could have been if I were high.
A few months after quitting that went away though.
Weed also made me lazy and paranoid after a while, so it was actively damaging to me.
I don't smoke anymore.
After dozens of detoxes, jail, prison, several rehabs, and a year of homelessness on the streets of NYC for an entire winter, I had had enough.
I moved to Cali and got back to my roots, computers. I picked up HTML / CSS and started learning Javascript. I started doing websites for people eventually I started a consulting business I later sold for a nice chunk. I now have a profitable start-up and was recently offered a CTO position at a Fortune 100 company.
I grew out of it. I don't want to get high anymore. It has been 10 years. I don't drink or smoke weed, and have no desire to. I still have addictive behaviors, but it just isnt an option anymore. Posting from a throwaway obviously this is not something I am ready to share at this point in my life but just wanted to relate for a brief moment.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3227547
Did I read it? No, but I read the abstract and intro. Study was about adults addicted to nicotine, alcohol, cannabis, or cocaine. 43k people total, about 12k people with a real DSM-IV diagnosis of addiction to one of these substances. Eventual remission rates for these things were over 90% (except nicotine, which was 88%).
The study is interesting, so let's start there. The results of the study surprised me, personally. I wouldn't have guessed the remission numbers were that high. I would have liked to see heroin, meth, or, far more pervasive in this day and age: prescription opiates.
It's certainly nice to see good news, and I do consider the study a kind of good news. The study obviously doesn't overstep its bounds or draw any big conclusions. I'm sure the people who actually did the study knew and experienced how damaging drugs CAN be in those 15-25 years before remission.
However, then we get to the article. The author runs the site substance.com and has published a book and several articles with a strong point of view about 12 step programs and the way young people with drug dependence are treated in today's society. I do think she's bending the study a little to her own aims, but I do appreciate her call towards sanity. It's a stretch, but I don't think she's being unfair to use this study to support her approach.
I don't think soft-selling the total life destroying danger of drug abuse is wise, and obviously it would suck if someone started taking drugs because they read an article or study like this, but it's possible.
>Moreover, if addiction were truly a progressive disease, the data should show that the odds of quitting get worse over time. In fact, they remain the same on an annual basis, which means that as people get older, a higher and higher percentage wind up in recovery. If your addiction really is “doing push-ups” while you sit in AA meetings, it should get harder, not easier, to quit over time.
Clearly the author is questioning the progressive nature of addiction but not considering the well known issue of defining addiction. Furthermore, to my understanding the "progressive nature" of the disease is not referring to the difficulty in quitting but rather the severity of the abuse of the substance.
In particular: there is evidence that the population we now group into the category "addicts" may in fact include two sub-populations, one of which "ages out", one of which does not. We currently have a "lumped model" of addiction, which associates certain additional features with the phenomenology we use to assign something to the category.
For example, if we find a person who is a chronic user whose use is negatively impacting their lives and who seems unable to stop, we are going to label that person an "addict". But the members of that category also get assigned other attributes for free. In particular, the current model of "addiction is a disease" says that anyone who fits the external phenomenology is also never going to get better without "treatment", or at best is very unlikely to do so.
But that association of "uncontrolled harmful use" and "its a disease" is a purely theoretical construct that may be wrong.
For comparison: I once worked on the genetics of a particular type of cancer that had two very distinct outcomes but which presented identically in a clinical setting. A physician I worked with described it as being incredibly frustrating, because she could literally see two patients in the same day who were apparently in the same condition based on histology, stage of the disease, everything, but ten years later one would be watching his daughter graduating from high-school and the other would have been dead for nine years. Simply because the diseases looked the same by some measures did not mean they were the same thing.
So it could well be that the same external phenomenology is present in two quite different conditions. It would be extremely silly to argue that one is "really" addiction and other is not, because "addiction" is just an abstract category we created to subsume different instances of similar phenomenology. We could call one grue and the other bleen, for all the difference it would make.
The possibility of two quite different underlying conditions presenting similar symptoms is one that has been realized often enough to be worth taking seriously, and when it occurs in things like the cancer described above no one ever makes the argument 'well X sounds like it is really cancer type Y to me'. Yet when the question of addiction comes up, many people say precisely that, and I am at a loss to understand why.
1. The kind that goes away. 2. The kind that just keeps getting worse.
for instance?
You can't reliably classify based on outcome.
In the general case there are four possibilities:
1) the different outcomes arise because of a difference in the individuals involved (this is useful for exploring treatment options: is there any way to make people with bad outcomes more closely resemble people with good outcomes?)
2) the different outcomes arise because of a difference in the disease-causing agent (this is useful when allocating treatment resources and preparing patients if the outcome is likely to be bad.)
3) some interaction between the first two factors
4) some other external factor is at play (you're a smoker, another patient is not.)
As I mentioned in another comment, I've done work on cancer genetics where the goal was to find out why some patients with what appeared to be the same disease "simply fell apart" (in the words of one of the physicians) while others lived relatively long and healthy lives). There certainly was a belief that we could classify the disease based on the outcome, and that belief motivated some fairly difficult research, but no one called it unreasonable because we had similar examples in the literature (Kahn's work on small round blue cell carcinoma being a famous case in point: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1867426/)
So: when you have populations with different outcomes, it is both reasonable and routine to ask if you have different conditions, despite superficial similarities in clinical presentation.
That's why I said 'reliably'. It's a great tool but it's not an oracle, and wuliwong was very heavily implying it's enough.
'[I]t is hard to argue that we “weren’t really addicted.” I don’t know many non-addicts who shoot up 40 times a day, get suspended from college for dealing and spend several months in a methadone program.'
This often goes unnoticed because there are many people who are addicted to things that the majority of society wouldn't consider an addiction. One might give up an "unhealthy" addiction for a socially acceptable one. Or their unhealthy addiction may simply shift, from one substance to another, or one activity to another, or one interest to another.
The more I've observed addiction the more I've realized that we are all addicts. I am addicted to water, yoga, meditation, HN, reddit, coding, etc. I've even come to realize that we are actually addicted to certain types of thoughts or ways of thinking. Addiction to "negative" thoughts is what results in "unhealthy" behavior.
I am currently addicted to observing myself for potential patterns of addiction and have gone so far as to create a simple app [1] that in a way takes control of the decision process away from myself. It produces a simple "yes" / "no" response and I'll ask it throughout the day if I realize I have a choice to make. "Do I go to yoga today?" -> "No".
The process of giving up control of my decisions was unnerving at first, but the more I practice it, the more peaceful I have become.
Looking at it with your lens, though, it's just an addictive personality. He's always gone full-bore into everything. Always. Now, instead of a socially acceptable 'hobby,' it's drinking.
Shit. That makes perfect sense.
I don't think it's very helpful in this conversation to talk about addictions as being Buddhist-like "attachments"--that is a completely separate topic. Addiction treatment isn't necessarily about controlling compulsion, it's about controlling destructive compulsion.
Previously, if I didn't meditate regularly, I would get irritable and become less harmonious. I became addicted to meditation as a way to prevent myself from becoming moody. I have found that yoga, swimming, and other "healthy" activities have the same effect on me. Ultimately all they do is alter my mental state and I would become edgy if someone interfered with my practice.
While I realize this a logical stretch for most people, I can see the addictive quality in my need for many seemingly healthy activities in my life. I am saying this as a person whom for many years has identified most closely with Buddhism.
My dad drank heavily when he was in the army. He fought in the front lines of two wars. I think he did it at least in part so he could sleep because alcohol helps suppress dreams (and, thus, also nightmares). About four years after he left the army, he swore off alcohol and basically never touched it again.
I loathe the taste of alcohol and, for most of my life, rarely have touched the stuff. But I did have a nightcap almost every night for a year at a time when I was very ill and doctors didn't really know what to do for me. At some point in there, it was not unusual for me to have two doubles with dinner -- the equivalent to four drinks. So I imagine I could have been classified as an alcoholic at that time. But when I got some answers and started getting healthier, I was happy to stop drinking. Like my father, I never attended AA, never wrestled with trying to resist temptation or whatever, etc.
In my father's case, I think it helped with psychological trauma. In my case, it helped me survive illness at a time when I didn't have good answers and wasn't getting adequate medical treatment. I have read or heard plenty of other stories that look to me like they fit one of those categories.
So I think the article oversimplifies things in suggesting it is just a developmental disorder, but I am thrilled to see a piece talking about the reality that most folks drink less as they get older, without getting any treatment. I really, really dislike the AA model.
2 glasses of whisky a day is not healthy but it's not alcoholism.
This is a bit tricky to describe but I'll do my best: let's assume you had two US doubles per day. Wikipedia says that 89 ml per drink. Let's round that up to 100 ml each drink. English public health has a concept of "units" to describe drinking amounts.
200 ml * 40 (the ABV of spirits) = 8 units per day.
Recommended safe limits are 3 to 4 units per day (without saving up to binge). You should try to have a couple of drink free days each week.
So, 8 units per day is over that level and increases the risks of harm.
Looking at definitions we see "alcohol misuse" which include "harmful drinking" and "alcohol dependency". http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/qs11/chapter/development-sou...
> The definition of harmful alcohol use in this quality standard is that of the World Health Organisation (WHO) The International statistical classification of diseases and related health problems (ICD-10): "a pattern of psychoactive substance use that is causing damage to health. The damage may be physical (for example, hepatitis) or mental (for example, depressive episodes secondary to heavy alcohol intake). Harmful use commonly, but not invariably, has adverse social consequences; social consequences in themselves, however, are not sufficient to justify a diagnosis of harmful use".
> In ICD-10 the 'dependence syndrome' is defined as: "a cluster of behavioural, cognitive, and physiological phenomena that develop after repeated substance use and that typically include a strong desire to take the drug, difficulties in controlling its use, persisting in its use despite harmful consequences, a higher priority given to drug use than to other activities and obligations, increased tolerance, and sometimes a physical withdrawal state".
Looking at the English guidelines for treatment we see that medically supervised withdrawal starts when you're drinking 40 units per day - that would be a one liter bottle of 40% whisky every day.
Here's the full guideline:
http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/qs11/chapter/introduction-an...
And here's the bit for lower end: http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/qs11/chapter/quality-stateme...
According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahl%C3%BAa:
Since 2004, the alcohol content of Kahlúa is 20.0% (21.5% alc. is still available only in Ohio[citation needed]); earlier versions had 26.5%.
This would have been around 2001-2002 in California. So, you should use the 26.5% figure. I don't know what a "shot" is considered to be. I mean as a standard measure. I assume there is a standard measure of "shot" though. So what would 2-4 shots of Kahlua a day be? Is that "alcoholic"?
Just curious. I never thought of myself as an alcoholic. I was clear I did this because it knocked back the extreme physical pain I was in at a time when pain killers did little or nothing for me and doctors weren't being especially helpful. I just wanted to hurt less and I wanted to SLEEP. So, I would have a drink with dinner or before bedtime, because nothing else was doing a helluva lot for me.
The sum to get UK units is:
Serving size in litres * ABV value
So 44 ml * 4 shots * 26.5 abv / 1000 conversion from ml gives 4.5 units per day.
A doctor (and obviously I am not a doctor) might ask you to cut back a bit, but that level of drinking is normal.
Did you feel urges to drink other than those shots? Did you experience bad things from alcohol but continue drinking? Did you find it hard to stop? I think some of these things would have been used to assess whether it was problem drinking or not.
It was a long time ago. I was also sometimes on medication, I was in a whole lot of pain, horribly sick, etc. So my memory of the details isn't exactly perfect here. Thus, I can't say how often I had the equivalent of four drinks per day vs 1-3 drinks or how long the 4 drinks level lasted (in terms of weeks/months). I do know it started at one drink and went up over time, which is another thing that would make a lot of folks go "Yup! Alcoholism!" I just know that for about a year, it was relatively rare for me to not drink alcohol at some point during the day because when I didn't, I was in tremendous pain and could not sleep. I did try different things, including vodka, and I vaguely recall getting seriously drunk at one time with some ... liqueur of some sort. (Again, I imagine that would look damning to some folks.) But what ended up working for me was Kahlua, usually with dinner.
Thank you for doing the math.
I find troublesome that the author of the article (renowned neuroscientist and addiction journalist as cited) suggests that addiction is akin to a habit. The behavior itself is certainly habit, but the addiction lies moreso in the etymology and function of the habit than the actual repetitive behavior. For some, the addiction is distraction, for some escape, for others a sense of identity, and so on and so forth. To prescribe "outgrowing the addiction" as a solution is awfully simplistic, almost suggesting that if an addict could only replace that habit with something else, then all would be hunky dory. Well, in theory, sure. Maybe we can start designing rehab centers like they used to do traffic school - Improv Traffic School, Comedy Traffic School, Bikers' Traffic School - maybe Knitters Rehab: "We'll help you put down that needle, and pick up this one!" or Foodies Rehab: "Stop smoking that joint, and learn to smoke these ribs!" The possibilities are endless. But not likely.
http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-04-17/how-americans-d...
This shows drug deaths as comparable to motor vehicle accidents.
(This includes both legal and illegal drugs, and poisoning from prescribed medicine, but I doubt that the rise in recent years is due to worsening quality of healthcare.)
According to the mortality data there would need to be much fewer than 1 million addicts in the 25-44 age range in the US for a majority of them to be dying before they get out of that age group, or even a sizable minority. And everything we know on addiction statistics puts that number much higher, at 10-20 million or more.
The data just isn't there. Addicts aren't going away because they are dying, period.
Some people who get hooked by drugs die, but addiction isn't nearly as deadly as it would need to be for the numbers to drop like they do, and statistically spontaneous remission is the most common way for people to kick the habit. Normally people grow out of it.
I've been through various doctors, and I'm seeing a psychiatrist right now to deal exclusively with the sleep issue. Apparently my GABA receptors are shot from taking these drugs for so long. Unfortunately I have but two real choices: taper quickly from the Ambien and deal with 3-6 weeks of little or no sleep, or do a slow taper with Valium which only has a 20% success rate.
Not sleeping for days really, really sucks.
Regardless, without going through the withdrawal process, that is one addiction you will not grow out of as stopping suddenly can be quite dangerous.
Better still, hard manual labour on shifts in a factory where slacking off stops production and is therefore not possible? Maybe in a hazardous environment where you have to be alert to avoid getting burnt or injured by machinery.
Seriously, put yourself through a few weeks in some industrial job and you will not have sleep problems after that.
had lots of sleep troubles and polyphasic helped her sleep more and better. (Of course, if you have a 9-5 corporate job, it's unlikely to work)
Thanks for the suggestion though, much appreciated.
I managed to work through it without using any medication, but it was only time and learning to trust that my body knew how to do the right thing (sleep), without my mind interfering, that eventually righted the ship.
I'm very curious as to why people say this, because it doesn't seem to add anything to the discussion or take it in any useful direction. I'm not trolling here: I really don't get it, and it bugs me a bit because it seems to distract the discussion from things that might be useful (and I've contributed to that distraction here, likely... sorry.)
Consider a similar case: small round blue cell tumours (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1867426/). These present identically in routine histology done on biopsied tissue, but in fact consist of four different types of underlying disease.
Neuroblastoma was identified in the 1800's. Non-Hodgin lymphoma wasn't fully classified until the 1960's. At no time did anyone say, "That's not actually a small round blue tumour" because that would have contributed nothing to the discussion.
If we treat "addiction" as a name for a set of symptoms that may arise from several underlying conditions, some of which can be corrected adequately by an act of will on the part of the individual and some of which cannot, we can start to ask interesting questions like:
1) How do we identify each type of underlying condition?
2) Are there more than two underlying conditions? Is there a more complex, more useful taxonomy?
3) Given the existence of a population that ages out or chooses to stop, are there ways that we can intervene to help them that exploit the specifics of their underlying condition that are different from what has proven to be effective in the population that does not age out and is not able to choose to stop?
And so on. All of these are useful, important, valuable things to say. "Then it's not really an addiction" is not.
I'm betting both of those.
Brains aren't computers but some aspects are analogous to computers. Some day we may create new systems that further our understanding of the brain and the mind
And each era got better and better models, and closer to the truth. The future eras' models of the brain will look much more like 'a network of computers' than an immaterial soul...
The analogy doesn't really go into mechanism, it just talks about routing and activation.
Often they layer it on pretty thick but South Park can be pretty incisive satire, especially as many quickly dismiss it for crass\childish humour.
Researcher Bruce Alexander of Simon Fraser University conducted an experiment called Rat Park, in 1978. From that wikipedia page:
Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself.
To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, an 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the square footage of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16–20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters. The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. "Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment." Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments.
My only disagreement is that I still think I'm recovering. I think I always will be, and I've accepted that. No rest for the wicked, I suppose. In addition, I took advantage of opiate replacement therapy, as cold-turkey was just too painful at the time (struggling with depression meant that the emotional side of withdrawals was dangerous for me). I'm finishing my taper in two months, after starting on 28mg of suboxone :)
I personally are certainly addicted to sugar. If I don't get my coloa/chocolate/icecream, I feel tired, hungry, sad, and am sometimes in pain, can't think about something else but sugar, and sometimes even walk long distances in the middle of the night in the worst of weathers to get to a 24 hours shop to buy something, if I don't have something at home. Telling this to doctors just yields them saying I'll get diabetes (or might already have it) if I don't change my behaviour, which is pretty much what I already know. Requesting general addiction treatment or food advisory training is not covered by my health care, they say.
I always thought that myself but is the first time that I see an article on it.
Most, if not all, addiction studies/reports/data/whatever doesn't count the people that overcome their addiction on their own, or at least on their own without causing major problems.
I would be really glad if this was discussed more often.
Anecdotally it seems to square with my observations of long time friends.
That said, I do think that there "a thing" that has aspects of a disease. The belief structure was created by folks from e early part of the 20th century, so there concept that the disease was a permanent affliction was probably just not correct.
I tend to look at addictions as a subset of obsessive/compulsive disorders, which has an additional chemical feedback loop enhancer.
Overall, our understanding of mental illness is woefully undeveloped. Most cases are diagnosed by interpretations Of subjective and self reported symptoms. The last time I looked at a discussion of this related to the new DSM, the very low interrator reliability I the diagnosing of mental illness was scandalous. Doesn't mean it's not a real thing though.
I experimented with cocaine, heroin, MDMA, crystal meth for about a month when I was 25.
Heroin was scarily addictive. I remember smoking from tinfoil turned black and mixing other drugs.
I stopped because I got asthma and started coughing up blood. It was opiod withdrawl is the worst but I never touched drugs again.
Anytime I think about my experience, it sends cold sweat, thinking how I could've done it. This is also good because I know the cold sweats keep me away from every repeating this. Its bad because I constantly think about the health implications of smoking heroin, crystal meth for about one month, and the rest of year smoking marijuana that smelled like febreeze.
I hope I'm okay I haven't gone to check with a doctor tho.
Also, is it possible that some of these people who are considered to have grown out of their addiction, simply substituted one addiction for another? I've heard that the rate of tobacco use among recovering alcoholics is very high. It's true that they're probably better off being out-of-control smokers than out-of-control drinkers. OTOH, I wouldn't say such people have really grown out of their addiction.
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Looks like he's not claiming that no-treatment was his particular path.
Having said, I'm still waiting on the day that I don't need to reach for my bottle of Vyvanse (Adderall, only exponentially less shitty and more amazing) every morning.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0062015893/
The thesis seems to be that the entire concept of "addiction" is misleading and inimical to efforts to reduce drug use.
OK, I know the definition of an addiction is that the behavior is having a significant negative affect, but there must be some notion of lack of control too, I would think.
I know plenty of my friends in college drank quite heavily. Afterward it tapered off. And some of had quite bad grades during that time. But no off us ended up as alcoholics after college. This was 20+ years ago, so one would assume real alcoholism would become apparent in this timeframe.
I read the article last night when it came up on /r/skeptic. The author describes a sort of adolescent addiction due to underdeveloped inhibitions of those who having reach their mid-20s. The thesis seems to say that some addictions are situational, like the distinction between a normal situational depression and a clinical depression (one that does not trace to a person's current life situation).
To restate my question: is what the author describes actual an addiction? Perhaps only those addictions that don't resolve themselves are addictions.
So instead of describe the situation as the author does -- some addictions resolve themselves -- perhaps the definition of addiction needs to be refined.
No, of course not.
I'm far from a specialist, but I would say that the 'addiction' definition has nothing to do with the ability to grow out of it on your own.
Addiction is a compulsive behavior that the individual does despite having the knowledge that is harmful for itself.
If you managed to get out of it (on your own or not) you are not an addicted person anymore. But that doesn't mean that it wasn't an addiction.
Anecdotally I can confirm I've smoked e-cigarettes quite heavily for a few months then stopped cold turkey and had zero withdrawal or cravings, but I occasionally feel a desire for smoking a cigar quite strongly despite having them at a rate averaging a few a year.
EDIT: Not majorly addictive, rather than not addictive at all.
And half don't. That's still a huge number, and they're not "simply growing out of it" two decades later. "Just wait a couple of decades, you might get better" is a crappy position to take.
And "chronic" means "recurring", not "permanent for the rest of your life". You can have a chronic problem that goes away after a while.
Time of diagnosis has a major effect on how your disease is modeled (the term I would use instead of "diagnosed"). Technically speaking, if you've ever had a manic episode, you're considered to have Bipolar I, the most severe version. If you're 28 and had one at 17 and never again... you probably don't have Bipolar I. That could be cyclothymia aggravated by a hormonal or sleep disturbance. It could be a one-off. Perhaps out of a fear of getting it wrong, the medical assumption is that a person who's had one episode is prone to having more. That might be a good policy for doctors (i.e. don't prescribe certain medications to people with histories of depression, or (hypo|)mania) but it's not a great model of how mental illness actually works. Some cases get better with age, and some get worse, and we really don't know why.
As addiction is a mental illness with behavioral complications, I'm not surprised. An episode of addiction is something one has to be aware of for one's life, but the treatment (don't use the drug) is something that, evidently, many people follow perfectly.
There is an annoying text-shadow: 0px 0px 1px
It shall smooth out the edges which sometimes are aliased
Damned hard, fucking painful, betimes hopeless, ..., but the most consistent memory from my early recovery was the simplicity of the process. There really was only one thing important: stay clean.
In my own case I aimed for staying clean for 2 years. And for those two years that was not "the most important thing", it was the only thing that mattered. Other factors helped too (supportive family was next most important), but I think I would not now be clean without the simplicity of that bright line rule of 2 years.
1. Be attractive
2. Don't be unattractive
None of these are simple processes, and it diminishes the discourse to treat them as such. I am thankful for your counterexample to my challenge, but I'm not convinced that, if asked sincerely about how you have managed your recovery from addiction, you could possibly sincerely respond: I simply grew out of it.
If an addict primarily yields to natural processes, he simply behaves in complete accordance with addiction.
Yes it is true that most people grow out of addiction.
But many do not. In my circle I count four dead, many more damaged by drugs.
Should we reject any research or analysis into drug problems just because some people struggle with drug problems? Or should we just reject the parts that don't agree with our view of the subject matter?
Did you read it?
You're reading your own bias into this article.
A perfectly reasonable counter to his arguments is the possibility that the data isn't terribly accurate. The data concerning people "classified as addicts" vs the hypothetical set of data for "actual addicts" might look very different (could we actually obtain this). The problem of classifying addicts or even really defining the term is very open as of now. Using datasets for addicts with the same confidence as datasets concerning those suffering from breast cancer for instance is foolish. The gray area as to whether someone does or does not have breast cancer is very small when compared to that same gray area with addiction.
My own experience shows that there are addicts who never get better, progressively get worse and tend to die very sad deaths. My family is riddled with this type of addict. The possibility that the author is not suffering from the exact same condition that my family members are afflicted with is not really considered. He spends one or two sentences describing how bad his addiction was as proof to the contrary but this is just shirking the real issue of identification. So yes, I think through the author's narrow-minded approach they are indeed treading dangerously on minimizing addiction and the "negative impact of drugs."
LSD might cause a bad trip (if used under sane circumstances, such as with a non-tripping sitter) less than 1% of the time, but the medical establishment has good reason even still to be nervous about it. (It probably shouldn't be illegal to research it. It's also not "safe" in the recreational context; not even close.) If aspirin seriously hurt 1% of the people who used it, it'd be off the market.
Also, losing 3-5 years of your life and career to a stigmatized health issue is a Big Fucking Deal even if you remit fully.
The OP may be taken to under-report the long-term psychological and neurological damage that can occur even when the addiction itself (and the use) goes away. For drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine, the "graying" (the loss of the ability to feel pleasure due to dopamine floods) can last for at least a decade. Then there's all the heart damage, which is not to be taken lightly. Plenty of people die from drug-related damage in their 50s and 60s even when they haven't used in years.
Damage by cocain and heroin are well known to the our medicine, while LSD is NOT. There is still an huge grey/dark area when it comes to damage caused by entheogens such as LSD. All we have is little bits of data, some little experiment here or there.
No, I'm not saying LSD is fun nor safe, but the propaganda out there about it is pure bs.
edit: really - addictions don't live inside you, perched on your heart, making you do bad things. They are not different than you.
edit: really? Happy to accept the downvotes on this one.
A homunculus didn't do it; I am it and I did that.
That's what the demons want you to think.
Many of your behaviors are effectively semi-autonomous reactions perched inside you.
Sure, we know from science and Occam's razor that devils and gods probably don't exist, but that doesn't mean participating doesn't show proven benefits. Although the studies that show the benefits of religion tend to find attendance means more than believe, so it is more of a network and support effect than anything actually spiritual.
Ministries are not known for their careful scientific rigor in defining and measuring success rates. That 50% could be coming from any of a number of biases ranging from blatant to subtle: "How to have a high success rate in treatment: advice for evaluators of alcoholism programs", Miller & Sanchez-Craig 1996 http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/addiction.pdf is a semi-humorous paper from some frustrated researchers describing how these bogus numbers come about (discussion: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/02/two-dark-side-statistic... ).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_the...
Come off it - where's the control group, where's the blinding, how big is the sample size, etc etc.
edit: and everything that you said is true. Don't be discouraged by the downvotes. People are downvoting facts that they don't that don't accord with with their prejudices, rather than people participating in bad faith or spreading misinformation.