LogFAQs > #905931272

Zeus posted...

While addiction is a disease, it's a disease that people bring onto themselves as opposed to say, a child who develops cancer.

Weeeeeellllllllllll.

While I'm one of the first to agree that calling alcoholism and similar issues a "disease" is something of a misnomer, and leads to mistreatment and misperception of behaviors in a lot of ways (and can easily lead to unhealthy rationalization/justification on the part of the addict), it's not 100% a purely behavioral issue. Like with most things in psychology, the reality is more complex, and the general population tends to oversimplify to the point of being blatantly wrong because most people don't actually understand psychology very well and just parrot back whatever wrong information they've heard someone else say.

Addiction disorders seem to be at least partially genetic/biological. Which is not to say that there's a gene that forces you to pick up a bottle and pour its contents down your throat (so yes, there's ALWAYS a "choice" and active engagement on the part of the user when it comes to addiction), but there does seem to be a genetic predisposition towards becoming addicted to things that radically alters just how much "willpower" a given person has to resist. For some people, peer pressure and life stresses and body biochemistry (and even potentially diagnosed psychological disorders of other kinds) can make it far harder to say no to the first drink (or smoke, or vape, or shot, or sniff, or pill, or...), and once you've established how good the high feels (and how bad the low feels), it can be much harder to stop than it might be for someone else.

The real problem is the point where a behavior goes from "use" to "abuse", and whether or not a given person can even sense when that line is crossed, or consciously choose to scale back their behavior once they cross it. Self-rationalization blocks a lot of awareness of the issue out, even things that are obvious to people on the outside looking in. Doubly so if negative effects aren't immediate, but things that only become a problem later (which is why we tend to gloss over addictions like caffeine, sugar, fatty foods, salts, etc).

What makes it more complicated is that most people aren't necessarily predisposed towards "alcohol addiction" or "heroin addiction" as much as they are predisposed to the addictive behavior itself, meaning that someone with an addictive personality can easily go their entire life never drinking a single drop of beer and still get addicted to something like gambling, video games, or spending way too much time surfing the Internet and posting on social media/message boards. Any behavior can be addictive, and people who treat the symptoms rather than the addictive personality itself can often easily just swap one addiction for another when quitting.

That being said, it's harder to blame someone for psychological damage that happened to them because all the bad choices/life events they made were when they were a teenager or younger, and as adults they're just reaping that same harvest, but yes, at a certain point you do generally just have to cut bait and stop caring, because for the most part, any addict generally needs to WANT to change before any outside support or advice or structure is going to help them improve. There's a reason why groups like AA only have a 5% success rate, and why there have been arguments that those 5% probably would have found other means of helping themselves regardless - because the program itself is mostly meaningless without the self-determination on the part of the addict, and because an addict with self-determination to improve can generally do so with any significant support network, not just a soulless 12-step program or "faith" (If anything, the most valuable part of AA is providing people with sponsors for support).


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