The importance of language to addiction
Addiction Economy Thought for Today - The Moral Model of addiction fosters a blame culture which views someone having difficulties with their use of a certain product as the result of individual weakness and lack of self-control. You can see the Moral Model at work most clearly in the language around addiction.
Here is a fascinating example of the damage of stigmatising language, but also how the narrow view of addiction through the lens of the Biological Model, addiction as a disease, is also limiting. In summary:
Alcohol is treated in hospitals as a liver disease, but whether the clinician sees or refers to the people they are treating as 'a substance abuser' or someone with 'substance use disorder' affected their treatment.
"Those in the latter category were viewed more sympathetically and as more worthy of treatment. I was quite surprised just how susceptible they were,” explained the author of a study “These were passionate, dedicated clinicians. They were still susceptible to the negative punitive bias.”
Interesting findings from a new study by transplant hepatologist Wei Zhang confirms “Emphasizing non-stigmatizing language is crucial not only for fostering honesty but also for supporting the overall treatment process and patient outcomes”.
Interesting he also comments “We are very good at seeing patients with liver disease but if we add this behavioral mental disorder, it is somewhat out of our scope". This is one of the limitations of the Biological Model - seeing and treating addiction only through the lens of disease, and where understanding of the Psychological Model and also the Social Model is also important.
(Not seen anything on if or how knowledge of the Economic Model would contribute to attitudes of stigma and bias, but wouldn't it be interesting to do some research on how that. Monika Kosinska, Phil Cain, Nason Maani have you seen any research on this with your 'commercial determinants lens? We argue that the person is not 'abusing' the product, but using it as designed, if anything the company supplying is abusing the person.)
This is just what Simon Bratt referred to in a previous article where the treatment of mental health and addiction are so siloed that if you are having difficulties with drugs or alcohol you can't get mental health treatment until you stop having the difficulties! Interesting to see too how putting it that way is different from '...is so siloed that addicts must get clean before they can be treated for mental health issues'.
Simon and I are collaborating on a joint article on the impact of stigmatising language - more soon
Thanks to Grant Ennis for the heads up on this. Harvard Edu
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/04/alcohol-is-dangerous-so-is-alcoholic/