Poll of the Day > Let's pray for Demi Lovato

(+) Yeah! (+)

Girl needs to be saved.
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but why did you delete the first one

because it had "The demi lovato"
bad grammar
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Serdar posted...

because it had "The demi lovato"
bad grammar

Oh, I see. Well, no, I actually didn't.

Feel bad for her, but prayers aren't gonna help. The girl needs to get her shit together before she ends up in an early grave
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I honestly don't care about her any more than anyone else that does heroin.

She needs to stop being a fucking bum and get her shit together.
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Serdar posted...

Girl needs to be saved.

Let's pray for you. You need Jesus.
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@TC prayers dont save people. Actions do.

@faramir77 posted...

I honestly don't care about her any more than anyone else that does heroin.

Thats pretty short sighted. A person makes a mistake and develops a mental illness (addiction) and so you dont care about them? Theyre still human and deserve to be treated just as much as any sick perosn.
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ZBug_ posted...

Thats pretty short sighted.

I think you misunderstood his point. He was saying that he doesn't view her as any different than any other heroin user. That's not necessarily a value assessment on heroin users. Instead, it could be read as a criticism of her receiving special treatment.

ZBug_ posted...

A person makes a mistake and develops a mental illness (addiction) and so you dont care about them?

To be fair, if somebody kept getting into car accidents, would you write all of those off as mistakes or would you take away their license? >_> The problem with framing drug use as addiction and metal illness is that you're absolving the participant of any and all accountability regardless of circumstance. Lovato *had* been through rehab in the past, she had been clean in the past, etc. And, more generally, if you're writing off things as being outside peoples' control due to their brain or body's functioning, that's an essentially an argument that nobody is responsible for anything.

And, while I believe in giving people second-chances, it's silly -- not to mention culturally dangerous -- to downplay the decision to do drugs as merely a "mistake." After all, how many times did you mistakenly inject yourself with heroin or another drug? How many times did you accidentally consume crack or crystal meth? By framing these things as being minor, you're tacitly encouraging people to do them. The fact remains that the vast majority of people have enough sense to not try any of these things.

ZBug_ posted...

Theyre still human and deserve to be treated just as much as any sick perosn.

Again, while I feel that addiction should be treated, that's a wrong-headed equivocation. While addiction is a disease, it's a disease that people bring onto themselves as opposed to say, a child who develops cancer. There are countless ailments which are cosmically unjust, just the universe's bad luck. Then there are other things indirectly tied to bad decision-making at least partly within the particant's control, whether it's obesity, blood pressure, etc. Finally, you have things that are 100% brought on by the user, whether it's sticking Tide Pods in their mouth for a Youtube video or consuming a known-hazardous recreational drug. Pretending that the three categories are the same is wildly offensive to anybody who developed an ailment for reasons entirely beyond their control.
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Nah. She knew better. We're taught from an early that drugs are bad. It's a shame, these people have more money than common sense. Like who tf turns to Heroin?
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I prayed for someone to give her an extra large slice of cheesecake. Hope that helps.

Zeus posted...

I think you misunderstood his point. He was saying that he doesn't view her as any different than any other heroin user. That's not necessarily a value assessment on heroin users. Instead, it could be read as a criticism of her receiving special treatment.

Bingo. It makes no sense to give special treatment and better wishes to someone who is a multimillionaire with a heroin problem than someone who is homeless with a heroin problem.

She's smart enough and rich enough to deal with this on her own.
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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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All that being said, yes, this particular scenario in general is definitely a case of special treatment for "celebrities" - no one would have given a shit or made a single topic about it if this was just Joe Randomguy on the street, let alone the 3-4 topics different people have made about it here alone in just the last week.

And honestly, I'd say her biggest problem is that, no matter what she may claim in interviews or articles, she's never really hit the point where she accepts that she NEEDS to change, which is why every rehab she does sticks for a short time before she starts using again (if it sticks at all). She's got a whole host of damage under the hood, and until she gets some of that baggage sorted out, no rehab is ever going to stop her self-destructive behaviors.

Eventually, she's either going to need a really good therapist, or a really good mortician.


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InhumaneRaider posted...

Nah. She knew better. We're taught from an early that drugs are bad. It's a shame, these people have more money than common sense. Like who tf turns to Heroin?

This.

I feel nothing for celebrities who do this to themselves all because they have too much damn money.
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Alcoholism is the only disease you can get yelled at for having.

CacciatoPart3 posted...

Alcoholism is the only disease you can get yelled at for having.

That's not really true. We yell at all sorts of people who have diseases that are either entirely their own fault or at least partially behavioral in nature.


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Addiction isn't really a disease people bring onto themselves because no one knows they'll be an addict until they start doing a drug or drinking alcohol. Some people can try a drug and not like it and stop. Or drink alcohol and have an adverse reaction and not want to keep drinking it. Addicts don't do that. The adverse reactions don't dissuade them from wanting to continue because they've unlocked the addiction disease in their brain.

Normal people will get hangovers and not drink for a while because they don't like it. Or they'll drink a couple drinks and stop because they know they don't want to get drunk or they have commitments tomorrow. Addicts can't stop because if they stop at two they'll literally have a physical pain in their body and mental compulsion to continue until they get drunk or black out.

But you won't know you're an addict until you take the first drink or drug. So how is that bringing it onto yourself? Once you unlock that part of you it's extremely difficult to just shut it off. It's not a switch you can just flip and you're cured.

People think that it's just so easy to stop drinking or doing drugs but it isn't.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

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.

Which comes back to my second point:

Zeus posted...

And, more generally, if you're writing off things as being outside peoples' control due to their brain or body's functioning, that's an essentially an argument that nobody is responsible for anything.

Or, in other words, we're *all* biologically (or environmentally) inclined towards certain things. It's a post facto argument that broadly alleviates all responsibility for anything anybody ever does >_>

ParanoidObsessive posted...

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).

While "use vs abuse" is a great argument when it comes to socially accepted behaviors (which arguably even includes smoking and drinking), heroin use is *not* socially acceptable by any stretch. From a very early age, most people are bombarded with anti-drug messaging which often spells out in detail why certain drugs are bad (especially when it comes to somebody her age since the messaging has improved over time as opposed to the "Any questions?" PSAs of the early 90s).

And, even with socially acceptable activities, many people *still* have the sense not to mess with them. For instance, countless people never tried smoking, despite the vast majority of children having at least some access to cigarettes as a kid.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

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.

While I'm familiar with the idea, the notion that addictive behaviors are interchangeable is somewhat silly especially since it inadvertently dismisses ideas like chemical addiction. Likewise, the argument glosses over the most relevant portion of addiction which is harm. Heroin, meth, and alcohol are all lethal addictions. It's a lot harder to OD on coffee, which is why it's a less-discussed addiction.
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It always kills me when people start talking about how praying does nothing in situations like this. If someone said that they hope things get better, nobody would have anything to say about it. But replace "hope" with "pray" and it needs to be made clear that you're not doing anything tangible.
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keyblader1985 posted...

It always kills me when people start talking about how praying does nothing in situations like this. If someone said that they hope things get better, nobody would have anything to say about it. But replace "hope" with "pray" and it needs to be made clear that you're not doing anything tangible.

tbh, people do get pretty ridiculous with their anti-religious virtue-signalling. Even I've done that at times although, tbh, I've sometimes criticized people saying that they hope somebody gets better because it's also a fairly meaningless statement. With the exception of sociopaths, most people wish for others' recovery and good health.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

CacciatoPart3 posted...

Alcoholism is the only disease you can get yelled at for having.

That's not really true. We yell at all sorts of people who have diseases that are either entirely their own fault or at least partially behavioral in nature.

It was a Mitch Hedberg reference.

CacciatoPart3 posted...

It was a Mitch Hedberg reference.

Potentially made doubly ironic by the fact that he was an addict on multiple levels and died of a speedball overdose.


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Jen0125 posted...

Addiction isn't really a disease people bring onto themselves because no one knows they'll be an addict until they start doing a drug or drinking alcohol. Some people can try a drug and not like it and stop. Or drink alcohol and have an adverse reaction and not want to keep drinking it. Addicts don't do that. The adverse reactions don't dissuade them from wanting to continue because they've unlocked the addiction disease in their brain.

Normal people will get hangovers and not drink for a while because they don't like it. Or they'll drink a couple drinks and stop because they know they don't want to get drunk or they have commitments tomorrow. Addicts can't stop because if they stop at two they'll literally have a physical pain in their body and mental compulsion to continue until they get drunk or black out.

But you won't know you're an addict until you take the first drink or drug. So how is that bringing it onto yourself? Once you unlock that part of you it's extremely difficult to just shut it off. It's not a switch you can just flip and you're cured.

People think that it's just so easy to stop drinking or doing drugs but it isn't.

This 100% mirrors my thoughts on the subject.
Most people can just try something and stop. Addicts cant, its the way the chemicals in their brains are wired. Its not 100% their fault.
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ZBug_ posted...

Most people can just try something and stop.

Depends on the substance and it's why you shouldn't even bother trying a lot of substances. I'm sure crystal meth and heroin feel great, but I'm not fucking with that shit.
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Smoking and drinking are one thing, but with hard drugs anyone of average intelligence knows that they're incredibly dangerous and addictive. I have less sympathy for those addicts because they should have known not to even mess with crap like that.
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Zeus posted...

Depends on the substance

No, it depends on the person.
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keyblader1985 posted...

Smoking and drinking are one thing, but with hard drugs anyone of average intelligence knows that they're incredibly dangerous and addictive. I have less sympathy for those addicts because they should have known not to even mess with crap like that.

The best thing to do when it comes to hard drugs and Hollywood is to improve conditions for the stars, make it less soul sucking and stressful for them.
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Kyuubi4269 posted...

Zeus posted...

Depends on the substance

No, it depends on the person.

Because there are people who magically go cold turkey on highly chemically addictive substances?
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