InvisibleEye
Bluelighter
Interesting article on Aeon about rural rehab: http://www.aeonmagazine.com/being-human/tobias-jones-addiction-rehabilitation/
Excerpt:
«One of the truisms about addiction is that people ingest narcotics to fill some kind of existential void or emptiness inside themselves. Often that emptiness evolves not just out of, say, a lack of parental love, but also out of the tragic loss of contact with nature. Now a recognised phenomenon called ‘nature deficit disorder’, it seems to me one convincing reason, among others, for the epidemic of drug addiction. Perhaps that’s why care farms and forest schools are suddenly booming. People are waking up to the fact that losing contact with nature can be as damaging as losing contact with relatives and friends.
Living in a woodland in deepest, darkest Somerset, our guests certainly get their fill of nature. We don’t deliberately give them demeaning jobs, but being knee-deep in pig shit, or building a compost loo, puts you in direct contact with the earthy realities of life. And reality, as the actress Lily Tomlin once quipped, ‘is a crutch for people who can’t cope with drugs’.
A corollary of that earthy reality is that, instead of being, in the old-fashioned phrase, ‘opium-eaters’, some of our guests eat a healthy dose of humble pie. And humility, as in 12-step AA orthodoxy, is the first step of the cure. Addicts often have a paradoxical combination of low self-esteem and massive ego, so recognising that they are ‘powerless’ over a substance is a vital reminder that they’re not super beings, just precious, weak humans, along with the rest of us.
AA is, of course, a much-debated institution. Founded in Ohio in 1935, it now has more than 2 million adherents and has been the model for dozens of other ‘Anonymous’ movements. Based on mutuality, it has no organisational structure to speak of, and yet it’s often accused of being cultish and controlling. Inspired by the ‘Oxford Group’ of Christians, it has always maintained that addiction is a ‘spiritual malady’ for which the only cure is conversion. Step three explicitly describes handing over responsibility for your recovery ‘to the care of God’. The AA’s ‘big book’ deliberately looks like a Bible, with its blue ribbon to mark a favourite passage. Those in recovery can invariably quote chapter and verse, and at the core of the book is that image of two evangelists — Dr Bob and Bill W — who went out into a darkness to spread the good news.
Research into the effectiveness of AA is notoriously unreliable (partly because of the anonymity that it promises). Recent studies suggest that it is no more or less successful than other behaviour treatments. But because AA was the first, and most famous, treatment programme, its influence on the wider recovery movement has been immense.
Most notably, AA’s notion that alcoholism is a disease — ‘a cunning, baffling and powerful disease’, as the big book puts it — has meant that for decades addiction has been seen in medical terms. This is something addicts yearn to hear, because seeing addiction as a disease allows a degree of self-forgiveness. It suits the medical profession too, because, in the scathing words of the psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple in Junk Medicine (2007), it creates ‘employment opportunities’ for the ‘therapeutic juggernaut’. It’s easier, he writes with sadness, ‘to give people a dose of medicine than to give them a reason for living’. So heroin-users are prescribed methadone, a heroin substitute famously invented by Nazis, and potentially as addictive and often fatal as the thing it’s supposed to replace. But the medicalisation of addiction also suits politicians. The Nixon administration in the US was the first to flood the market with methadone in 1970 and, ever since then, it’s been seen as a politically expedient substance: not because it reduces addiction, but because it reduces crime.
There are now, however, stirrings of a backlash against the consensus. Voices on the right of politics, such as Theodore Dalrymple and Peter Hitchens, complain that the war on drugs has never actually been fought, that we have fudged it and allowed addicts to dictate policy. Damian Thompson’s polemic, The Fix (2012), eloquently challenges the ‘disease’ analysis, saying that ‘the behaviour of addicts looks voluntary because it is’. Conservative commentators lament our tendency to find a ‘disorder’ for every deviant behaviour, thus exculpating everyone. They distrust the diffused ideology that, somehow, any self-control is bad for you. [...]»
Excerpt:
«One of the truisms about addiction is that people ingest narcotics to fill some kind of existential void or emptiness inside themselves. Often that emptiness evolves not just out of, say, a lack of parental love, but also out of the tragic loss of contact with nature. Now a recognised phenomenon called ‘nature deficit disorder’, it seems to me one convincing reason, among others, for the epidemic of drug addiction. Perhaps that’s why care farms and forest schools are suddenly booming. People are waking up to the fact that losing contact with nature can be as damaging as losing contact with relatives and friends.
Living in a woodland in deepest, darkest Somerset, our guests certainly get their fill of nature. We don’t deliberately give them demeaning jobs, but being knee-deep in pig shit, or building a compost loo, puts you in direct contact with the earthy realities of life. And reality, as the actress Lily Tomlin once quipped, ‘is a crutch for people who can’t cope with drugs’.
A corollary of that earthy reality is that, instead of being, in the old-fashioned phrase, ‘opium-eaters’, some of our guests eat a healthy dose of humble pie. And humility, as in 12-step AA orthodoxy, is the first step of the cure. Addicts often have a paradoxical combination of low self-esteem and massive ego, so recognising that they are ‘powerless’ over a substance is a vital reminder that they’re not super beings, just precious, weak humans, along with the rest of us.
AA is, of course, a much-debated institution. Founded in Ohio in 1935, it now has more than 2 million adherents and has been the model for dozens of other ‘Anonymous’ movements. Based on mutuality, it has no organisational structure to speak of, and yet it’s often accused of being cultish and controlling. Inspired by the ‘Oxford Group’ of Christians, it has always maintained that addiction is a ‘spiritual malady’ for which the only cure is conversion. Step three explicitly describes handing over responsibility for your recovery ‘to the care of God’. The AA’s ‘big book’ deliberately looks like a Bible, with its blue ribbon to mark a favourite passage. Those in recovery can invariably quote chapter and verse, and at the core of the book is that image of two evangelists — Dr Bob and Bill W — who went out into a darkness to spread the good news.
Research into the effectiveness of AA is notoriously unreliable (partly because of the anonymity that it promises). Recent studies suggest that it is no more or less successful than other behaviour treatments. But because AA was the first, and most famous, treatment programme, its influence on the wider recovery movement has been immense.
Most notably, AA’s notion that alcoholism is a disease — ‘a cunning, baffling and powerful disease’, as the big book puts it — has meant that for decades addiction has been seen in medical terms. This is something addicts yearn to hear, because seeing addiction as a disease allows a degree of self-forgiveness. It suits the medical profession too, because, in the scathing words of the psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple in Junk Medicine (2007), it creates ‘employment opportunities’ for the ‘therapeutic juggernaut’. It’s easier, he writes with sadness, ‘to give people a dose of medicine than to give them a reason for living’. So heroin-users are prescribed methadone, a heroin substitute famously invented by Nazis, and potentially as addictive and often fatal as the thing it’s supposed to replace. But the medicalisation of addiction also suits politicians. The Nixon administration in the US was the first to flood the market with methadone in 1970 and, ever since then, it’s been seen as a politically expedient substance: not because it reduces addiction, but because it reduces crime.
There are now, however, stirrings of a backlash against the consensus. Voices on the right of politics, such as Theodore Dalrymple and Peter Hitchens, complain that the war on drugs has never actually been fought, that we have fudged it and allowed addicts to dictate policy. Damian Thompson’s polemic, The Fix (2012), eloquently challenges the ‘disease’ analysis, saying that ‘the behaviour of addicts looks voluntary because it is’. Conservative commentators lament our tendency to find a ‘disorder’ for every deviant behaviour, thus exculpating everyone. They distrust the diffused ideology that, somehow, any self-control is bad for you. [...]»
