The news reports on Charlie Sheen’s recent exploits make excellent fodder for examining our culture’s beliefs about addiction. They’re giving me too many ideas to write about. For now, I’ll focus on the schizophrenic nature of our beliefs. A report in the Daily News questions the wisdom of Sheen’s latest treatment episode, which he will undergo at home rather than at a treatment center:
The clearest benefit for a patient receiving rehabilitation treatment at home is that he receives all the comforts of, well, home.
But this can be a mixed blessing.
The only mixed thing here is the logic of the recovery culture. The article goes on to bring up a bunch of non-issues – that it’s inconvenient to bring medical equipment to him, or that it’s expensive. Like I said, these are non-issues, because he has tons of money to facilitate such things, not to mention he’s probably been using cocaine which doesn’t result in the need for the kind of intensive detox procedures that opiate, barbiturate, and alcohol users sometimes need. He’ll get the medical care he wants, and a few doctors and nurses will get healthy paychecks, what’s the big deal? Oh, here’s the big deal:
Making an addict feel “at home” isn’t always the wisest treatment move.
“Every time you sacrifice something to make rehab more ‘like home’—you are catering to the way the addict’s life is currently operating,” said Dr. David Moore, psychologist and author of the NY Daily News weekly column ‘Addictions & Answers.’
For example, Sheen is likely to have full access to his cell phone and internet, a luxury that is usually denied to patients first entering rehab.
Notice the word “catering” in that quote, there’s a boatload of contempt hiding underneath it – contempt which creeps out from under the rock long enough to extend it’s claws towards cell phones and internet service.
Even if the patient being treated at home has every medical marvel at his fingertips, there’s one thing he’s likely to miss out on – group counseling.
Sheen may be intent on avoiding the cameras but he may have trouble succeeding in sobriety if he doesn’t have contact with non-celebrity addicts.
“It requires a very motivated person,” said Levounis. “Part of rehabilitation is asking for help, having humility and the ability for introspection. You can’t bring an AA meeting into someone’s home. It’s helpful if the patient is willing to leave the home for group therapy and counseling.”
Ahhh yes, he needs to humble himself. It all becomes clear now, he needs to be taken down a peg, be deprived of the ability to communicate freely via cellphones and internet, stop being catered to, get off his high horse and mix it up with non-celebs, he needs AA meetings and group therapy. These are the attitudes of people whose ideas have no real basis in reality. Is addiction a disease which requires treatment? That seems to be the consensus, after all, the experts in this article are discussing medical treatment – yet it sounds like they’re also discussing the best way to punish him and crush his ego. This situation gives me so much insight into their constant calls to “accept that it’s a disease so we can stop punishing people and start treating them”. I now realize that when they say that, it’s really directed at themselves, not the people like me who challenge the disease concept. They don’t see a man who could choose to change, they see nothing more than an animal who at best, could possibly be tamed into submission. To them, the question is whether this dog is rabid, or simply behaving badly. To be sure, they’ll give him some rabies shots, then hit his nose with a rolled up newspaper and wipe his face in his own piss for good measure.
Those of us who don’t buy the disease concept see a third option – we don’t need to try to control this man, punish him, or beat him into submission, we’d like to try to appeal to him as a human being, we’d like to appeal to his mind, wouldn’t that be an amazing tact to take?
Read the full story at The Daily News:
Does at-home drug rehab work? Charlie Sheen reportedly receiving help at his Los Angeles home
For the record, I’ve read quite a few studies recently that show no added benefit to group therapy when compared to individual therapy – the main difference is cost.
Steve,
Sitting here in the office and I laughed out loud at the urine comment. Could not contain myself.
The treatment community is so lost within itself. The control model exists for one fundamental reason, and it is not the money (although that is a secondary lesser motive as well); it is to make the counselor’s job easier. To control others is the easy way to “help” people, it is based completely on expediency, not love, compassion or the reality of what works. Like parents who force their teenage son or daughter to behave and tapdance, the method is totally ineffective. The difference though is this; parents are stuck with their kids, and every day they are present to reap the consequences of attempting to control, while in stark contrast, the counselor gets paid, “graduates” his/her victim in the name of “helping,” and then moves on without actually being a part of that person’s life after “treatment.” Out of sight, out of mind – the damage is done. The resultant destruction of life by implementing control model treatment is never quantified by these well intentioned “professionals.” And so, the control of the vulnerable continues in treatment, and as long as there is money to be made in it, the industry will continue to attact those who like to be in this lofty position. So sad. As St. Jude’s has been saying for over 2 decades, “Treatment Doesn’t Work.”
But allowing people to self analyze, self discover through option presentation has been the way humans empower themselves for millenia. Common sense does prevail, and it seems those “addcits” that rebel from “treatment” may be the smart one’s after all!
Mark Scheeren
Chairman
St Jude Retreats
Thanks Mark, I’m glad you enjoyed that.
It’s very absurd when you hear all these complaints that we’re keeping people from getting the benefits of “medical” treatment and science – then you read garbage like this. They’re not delivering medicine, they’re punishing and psychologically abusing people. Your writings about the control model are poignant, and they highlight what we should really be trying to do. If we wanted to force people to stop using drugs, then we could lock them all up, but that’s not the point. We want them to make better choices for themselves, so they can go live the marvelous life they’re already capable of living. Punishment, humiliation, and control may lead to externally motivated choices, but I think it’s the internally motivated choices that really matter and really form the foundation of long-lasting positive change.
Another example of the “humbling” prescribed to Sheen, from an article at Big Hollywood:
“In May of 1994, I walked into a Hollywood chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous for the first time; while waiting for the meeting to begin I watched as an Academy Award-wining actor swept the floor. It was his humbling little task. It’s what kept him sober, he told me.”
Sweeping the floors is romanticized again as the article closes with this:
“Somewhere deep inside Charlie Sheen is a humble man that desperately wants to get out and sweep the floor. But as long as Hollywood keeps him in the limelight for his deplorable behavior he won’t “get it.”
It’s fine if sweeping the floors makes someone feel good, and I take no issue with someone doing such a thing and feeling that it helps them on some spiritual level. But when such behavior is demanded as a means to “humble” aka humiliate someone, it doesn’t amount to an effective “medical treatment”, and it’s actually somewhat psychologically abusive. Exploring your values, strengths, and alternative behaviors that play to those strengths and values is key, and I don’t know of any evidence that sweeping floors or making coffee are an integral part of that thought process.
I would have to say that if the goal of “recovery” was to stop the person from using alcohol/drugs, urine, blood or follicle tests would be the easiest & most accurate way to determine & document compliance.
But the point of “recovery” is the person accepting all the claims & demands of recovery culture – publicly reciting one’s embarrassing/bad behavior (and later “adjusting” the story to conform with the addiction/bottoming out/recovery story arch), admitting inability to refrain from using without group membership, giving a higher priority to the demands of the group than to one’s own life goals ( “don’t go look for a new job, make coffee for the meeting instead”).
The evidence that “recovery” is about being a member of the recovery movement (in the form of adhering to recovery ideology & attending recovery group meetings) is the demeaning attitude recovery culture takes towards the actual abstaining from using the substances in question. Any effort to “merely abstain” (quit using, but no meetings) is dismissed as misguided & doomed to failure. Meanwhile, someone who has accepted the recovery movement’s claims & social demands, who then consumes alcohol or drugs is having a “relapse” – an expected part of the “recovery process”.
If “recovery” were truly about getting people to refrain from using alcohol/drugs, then they would not demean efforts at abstinence independent of their ideology & organizations. The fact that actual use of alcohol/drugs by people who identify as “in recovery” is minimized as just part of the process, while actual Not Using for even substantial periods of time is dismissed as at best misguided effort, and at worst, being a “dry drunk” (having all the negative character & behavioral issues of someone in the depths of addiction) demonstrates that the recovery movement is not about the abstaining. It’s about accepting the ideology & identifying with the group.
Recovery is about nothing so much as perpetuating recovery.
P.S. Why is it that not one of the 12 Steps is: “I will quit drinking”?