The term addiction has become almost synonymous with a rehab, and the sense that if anyone has an addiction to anything they should be put into a rehab and have the addiction dealt with.
The whole world of addiction and addiction recovery is quite a complex one, but needs to be addressed quite carefully in order to make sure that genuine and harmful addictions are dealt with.
The danger is that the term addiction can be used to cover a whole multitude of sins that in effect block the effectiveness and powerfulness that recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction can bring.
Addiction to alcohol has been an issue in society for as long as most people can remember. Rehabs that began to spring up after the advent of Alcoholics Anonymous began to deal with alcoholism as an alcohol addiction.
After a while rehabs began to admit people who were not only alcoholics but had other addictions as well most notably narcotics or drugs. But often there was an overlap between the two and someone who was an alcoholic would often use drugs and vice versa.
Addiction
Addiction became a term that was used to apply to any type of compulsive behaviour that caused serious damage to an individual or their life or their family.
Addiction then became the focal point for a rehab, with the rehab saying that if an individual had an addiction to any substance or type of behaviour such as gambling, then they most likely had what they referred to as an addictive personality.
This meant that the rehab could treat or offer various addiction treatment programs to the individual, almost irrespective of what their focus of addiction was.
There’s no doubt that in a lot of cases this approach works and is hopeful, although a lot of people will dispute the idea of an addictive personality. The nature of addiction is quite complex, and many people get bogged down in the root causes of it in terms of physiology, psychology and medicine. Most of the scope of that is beyond the nature of addiction as is treated in a rehab.
Addiction is often clearer to those affected by it than to the person themselves was addicted to alcohol or drugs. Perhaps the chief value of a rehab is at it gives individual space, even for a short time, to have to own their addiction, be it to alcohol, drugs or any other substance and to get some sort of very basic reality check.
Any type of addiction can be harmful, but should always be weighed against individual’s ability to deal with it on their own, or have to get to space where they need help whether they are in a position to acknowledge that or not.