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Humanizing Addiction
_Interview - Good Friend_
We interviewed an individual with personal ties to addiction, in this case a close friend who suffered/suffers from addiction. We feel this interpersonal story give a human portrait of what addiction is, what it does, and how it affects human beings.
Q: How did their addiction begin?
A: His addiction to alcohol built over a very long period of time but I remember that even in high school, his drinking seemed different from other people. For example, after a few hours of drinking most people would get tired. He would gain energy and sometimes seem more clear-headed. Eventually he expanded his drinking beyond social situations. He would drink alone on days off work, starting in the morning. Eventually he would drink on the way to work and would leave work at lunch to drive around for an hour drinking and return for the afternoon. He'd stop on the way home to toss the empties he had stashed under the driver's seat.
Q: Was there anyone who supported them through recovery?
A: His recovery is not complete. He stopped drinking for years and went to AA, started drinking again and went to 28-day in-patient rehab (twice). Throughout their thirty-year marriage, his wife supported his sobriety.
Q: Did anyone encourage them to seek our professional help?
If so, how did this go?
A: When he relapsed and was driving drunk regularly, his wife told him he had to go to rehab or move out because his behavior wasn't safe for him, for their family, or for others on the road. I think the last straw was around 2013 when she came home from work and found him asleep in the car in the garage, engine running, empties on the back seat. He said he had fallen asleep before coming into the house but it may have been a suicide attempt. Friends agreed with his wife, and the combined pressure led him to 28-day rehab the first time.
Q: Did they seek out treatment on their own?
A: The first time he stopped drinking, that decision was not entirely voluntary. He had been arrested for Driving While Intoxicated and started AA and outpatient counseling as a requirement of his sentence. The two stints in rehab, while technically voluntary, required substantial pressure from family and friends (and perhaps his employer, although I don't know that for sure).
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Given his recidivism, I cannot say that any of these steps have been effective. However, they have kept him alive for the last 15 years and that may not have been the case. Also, my understanding of alcohol addiction is that it often takes several tries to kick.
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During his periods of sobriety he has seemed happier at times but not always (see below about other medical conditions).
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He now believes he has underlying anxiety and depression, and has been treated for those conditions only in the last ten years or so. Having known him my entire life, I agree with him about the anxiety and depression. I saw them when we were kids but I didn't understand the importance of them or know what I could do about them. He was a good friend and fun to be around, that was enough for me and in retrospect I took advantage of it. I feel responsibility and guilt over my role in his drinking over many years.
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I do not think he will be able to maintain sobriety until the anxiety and depression are fully addressed, and those conditions are notoriously hard to treat. Plus, the more he screws up his life with alcohol, the more he creates real problems that make him depressed.
Q: What forms of treatment do you think helped their recovery most?
A: Most insurance companies only pay for 28 days of in-patient rehab but my understanding is that this duration is not based in science. I believe it is far too short. After the second rehab stay, he moved to a voluntary "sober living" facility where there is monitoring and support services. He was allowed to leave and worked his regular job during the day but returned to the facility at night. It seems like a good re-introduction to normal life and he stayed about a year. I don't know if he left voluntarily or was asked to leave. Now he is in a rental apartment and I worry that all the unstructured time is not good for him.
As described above, the treatment of underlying medical conditions is equally important as the treatment of addiction. Also, I believe that it is very important to get away from the situations in which they drink. I don't just mean staying out of bars, but also staying away from the situations that led them to the bars in the first place. This means changing jobs, cities, maybe even family and friends. It is a daunting proposition.
Q: What do you want society's perception of drug use to look like?
A: As far as I can tell, alcohol addiction is a combination of a person's predisposition to it and the choices they make of their own free will. I don't know if the scientific community really understands the balance between the two and I'm sure society in general doesn't. My theory is that people are on a continuum meaning some alcoholics are addicted largely because of their choices and probably have the ability to stop drinking. Biologically they are more like "regular people" who can drink without it causing trouble in their lives. On the other hand I think there are many people who have personalities or brain chemistry that makes them very susceptible to alcohol addiction and once they started drinking they were nearly powerless to stop. Honestly, if it wasn't alcohol it would have been drugs or food or gambling or something else. For these people the addiction is truly a disease for which they should not be blamed and for which they deserve treatment, just like cancer patients or anyone else. Again, this is my opinion and it is not based on research, but if I'm right then 1) society should spend more money identifying the brain chemistry that makes a person susceptible to addiction, and 2) view the addicts with it as patients suffering from a medical condition.
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