Co-dependancy is also one hell of a drug. Feels like the placebo effect, but working against you.
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That’s one of the things I’ve struggled with in dealing with family members in the same boat. The general assholerly that comes along with it in some cases. It’s tough to help out a brother-in-law who’s struggling with addiction. It’s doubly hard when he was an ass before he got hooked.
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My statement isn’t 100% across board solid fact. Nor is it painting a complete picture. Clearly there isn’t a set of parameters that always leads or doesn’t lead people into addiction.
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But there is a lot of research showing that addiction disproportionately affects the poor as well a correlation with depression, anxiety, and other issues.
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While overly general, it is not “total nonsense”.
I don’t have time to read fully, but skimming it looks like these two articles touch on my point, but there is a lot of info out there if you wanna google it.
Or if short colorful, yet perhaps not very deep, videos are your thing:
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Paid less than teachers and not even a living wage for many cities, after building up extensive graduate school debt, the community mental health counselors of our country are then set up to fail within unrealistic expectations to fill oversized case loads while balancing semi-regular client emergencies. Yet, they are the ones on the front line of fixing our largest killers while everyone half pays lip service to the importance of better mental health services.
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The situation is not helped by the (intellectually dishonest and also oh-so-neatly aligned with class and race interests; but deeply popular) fact that high-functioning addicts who can conceal an addiction(either through stealth or through reasonably respectable doctor-shopping, or a bit of both) aren’t judges as ‘addicts’ because they aren’t known to be addicts; and people who are pretty definitely acting in a habituated and dependent sort of way can avoid being ‘addicts’ if they can still tick the boxes that are expected of someone in whatever position they are in(eg. maintain expected working hours if you have a job that demands them of you; don’t be too visibly intoxicated in public unless you are on frat row or the home team has just won/lost the big game; definitely don’t be pregnant while on drugs).
Once you remove the high functioning covert ones and the ‘probably a little too much ‘life of the party’ for his own good; but that’s cool’ ones from the “addicts” pool the remainder that can’t dodge being “addicts” are skewed kind of loser-ish, since the selection criteria eliminated many of the most promising ones.
This isn’t to say that it’s all, like, just a classist social construct, man; but I suspect that, say, a fellow of Henry Nicholas’ tastes would have been cut a bit less slack if he weren’t an enormously talented electrical engineering PhD with a few billion dollars who is also reputed to enjoy copious drugs and disputes allegations that he added a hidden underground complex to his house for easier access to prostitutes while his wife was on vacation.
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I’m not expert/can’t evaluate the research, but there are some recentish (last ten years) rat studies cited in this Wikipedia entry that suggest that the level of “environmental enrichment” impacts whether rats get addicted to cocaine.
Sounds like the rat equivalent of @Mister44’s “people who are overall happy and have their needs met,” though rats aren’t people, and studies are flawed.
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It is often very necessary to reset the receptors. The alternative is ever larger doses to achieve the same effect, which in turn raises the risk for an overdose.
Also, most people will need to someday stop taking the pain meds. The process is exponentially harder when one is taking large doses.
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My mother was addicted to Valium and Alcohol through all of my childhood. I got into an alcohol dependency around the beginning of the 90s, which lasted until mid-2k where I was able to substitute the need for Alcohol with less harmful relaxants like for example video games. I only drank socially, but regularly abundantly. According to what I know today, my alcohol habit was the consequence of social anxiety which, in turns, was the result of undiagnosed Autism Spectrum Disorder, which is typical in my generation and earlier ones. Looking back at how my mother was in the past, I very much suspect that she was on the Autism spectrum too. Alcohol helps build a bridge for people with social anxiety when they can’t find any other way to do so. I don’t need that now because I stopped caring about building bridges. Anyway, there are often underlying conditions that cause addiction. The addiction itself, though, is probably not the illness but a desperate attempt at self-medication.
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First they came for the natives.
Then they came for the black folks.
Then they came for some more natives.
Then they came for the black folks again.
Then they came for the poor folks.
Then they came for the Japanese.
Then they came for the communists.
Then they came for the black folks, again.
Then they came for the hippies.
Then they came for the trade unionists.
Then they came for the black folks again.
Then they came for the poor, again.
Then they came for the drug addicts.
Then… ah, who gives a fuck, we’re all fucking doomed because democracy has always been a lie.
Your statement says that happy people don’t get addicted, and that is some happy horseshit.
It’s a good thing we’re rats and everything is cocaine, then.
What about my opinion leaves you so uncomfortable as to contradict with basically an ‘i don’t know what I am talking about, other that that you’re wrong’?
My per dosage use is the same as it has been for years. My per day dosage is now half of what it used to be because I figured out that it doesn’t let me fall into a good sleep. I am in sleep limbo until it wears off. It makes it impossible to function if one is expected to work from 8 to 5.
I’d love to stop taking these bastards. I fantasize about little nano bots that I can control and zap my tumors. I also fantasize about just cutting my fucking leg open and going to town, but that would be bad. Still, they will come up with a treatment at some point. Hopefully in my life time.
Uh, no, I said “less likely”. Which I provided evidence for.
I avoid talking in absolutes in general. Yes there is the rat studies, but also the studies that addiction hits harder for people who are unhappy. In short if you are getting happy hormones from your life, the effect of drugs and activities that become addictive is lessened. And to be clear I am talking addiction in general, not just drug and alcohol addiction. People get addicted to activities (gambling, gaming, etc) and this is solely from the activity triggering ones internal chemistry.
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Oh, you asked @Mister44 where he got the idea that people whose needs were met were less likely to become addicts. I happened to have read some (non-scholarly) articles that made that exact argument based on rat studies, so I tried to track down the original studies. Thought you might be interested, since it sounds like you hadn’t heard of them.
Actually, I just realized it was probably through BoingBoing that I heard about that. ANd sure enough:
ETA:
Reread your post and it sounds like you were saying that people with Cluster B disorders self-medicate themselves to addiction. The research on rats suggest that they self-medicate themselves to addiction for other reasons. So, I actually don’t see a contradiction.
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When you’re done, send those little nano bots over here to zap whatever causes my nasal polyps, please.
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This.
And the reminder that most public mental health providers are 1-4 years out of graduate school, so very young, with few material or experiential assets, and rarely have any medical (psychiatrist) support. Psychologists cannot prescribe. (If you think there’s a connection between the proliferation of cold turkey/non-medical addiction treatment, despite its known evidentiary failures, and the fact that the psych specialists are not allowed to even discuss medication, that would be why. We’re doing the best we can with the laws we must follow.)
The average public mental health provider spends less than 4 years in the job. Burnout is astronomical. They have client loads in the several hundred (a psychologist should have a weekly client load under 40, and under 150 per month); they often have no or poor benefits because cities and counties prefer to hire contractors.† Pay? Teaching in a charter school without a teacher cert pays better. And 80% of public mental health issues are social work issues: if your client is struggling on Maslow 1 (shelter, safety, calories), therapy just wastes everyone’s time. Housing first, calories second, medical care third, secure job fourth, then we can work on addiction.
The best thing about ACA was seeing new therapists get job offers for $40K a year, 40 hour weeks, full benefits, client loads in the recommended range. Which lasted exactly 2 years. Salaries are now back in the $30s, and client loads are spiking.
† A new family practitioner should have a client load of about 80 per week, up to 100, with a full roster in the 500 patient range. But a GP can see someone for 15 minutes once every 3 months.
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I sympathize with your situation. I had a series of back surgeries, and experienced some of the same “sleep limbo”, dosage changes, and system resets. It was not a happy time. I hope you have a good doc on your side. That makes a big difference.
I am sure everyone here hopes that you have the best possible outcome.
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Man, we could do multiplayer and blast them together!
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I think it is really interesting to think about what that pragmatically looks like. Assuming the provider doesn’t do any kind of intake or emergency, and istead operates with well-oiled mental health and addictions clients that come in like clockwork, 40 clients coming in would be doing 50 minute sessions 10 minute case documentation for a 100% full and super-human efficient week. Never mind if a client is a danger to themselves or others, late, being onboarded, or in need of other services that likely aren’t readily or clearly available. Never mind if there’s more expectations beyond just churning clients or if there’s any sort of emotional toll of actually trying to help people frequently near rock bottom. Never mind any ethical obligations to the client. It doesn’t surprise me in the least burnout is so high when the expected client load, which is frequently exceeded, already expects the practitioners to be martyrs for their work as a baseline. Maybe the practitioners see that as okay, but from the outside the ACA hardly seems sufficient to the needed integrated social and mental health work, and the ACA was apparently a dramatic improvement… I’m not a social worker, addictions, or mental health professional, but it’s probably worth talking to a few.
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I was gonna mention the same thing; the 25 F16’s seemed awefully expensive, but given a recent stat I heard that US defence spending is ~$3600 / per capita, I figured yah, a few billion apiece is probably right. Sadly.
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