four months pass...
seven years pass...
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eleven months pass...
I stepped away from this thread about a year ago because it was proving to be absolute purgatory trying to discuss the subject of addiction with people on here. However, I have been reading through it again recently and, reacquainting myself with the almost cartoonish obnoxiousness and intellectual dishonesty of many of my opponents, I am compelled to return to the matter. I am mainly because I still think that the argument I was trying to make - namely, that addiction isn't an illness - is basically correct, and that the arguments of my opponents, for all their deep intellectual and moral smugness, are basically a load of incoherent, muddled-headed waffle. Ideally, this would go on a more general addiction thread; however, the discussion originated here and I also want to address some of the criticisms - if you can call them that - of my views voiced here. I mostly want to write this simply to let it stand as a clarification/elaboration of my views on addiction for any future observes of this thread. If the conversation above is anything to go by, this board is a fairly suffocating, hopelessly bigoted place in which reasoned debate is pretty much impossible; as such, I won't vainly attempt to stimulate any.
I don't think it's correct to describe addiction as an illness; insofar as, if you put a gun to someone's head, he would be able to stop. What we call addiction is really just the human state in which the compulsion for excess is harder (or much harder) to restrain than it is for most people. There's always a choice involved, and, as such, "addiction" is always to some extent self-indulgence. However, to observe this isn't to preclude sympathy for human frailty; and the view that PSH was merely being gleefully feckless and selfish is almost certainly highly reductive (especially given that he had managed to stay dry for 20 years.)
― Freedom, Friday, 15 December 2017 12:01 (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
addict concern trolls are the fucking worst, seriously go fuck off and be responsible somewhere else FREEDUMB
― brimstead, Friday, 15 December 2017 16:18 (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
Given that I am someone who up until quite recently was in the habit of drinking about five bottles of wine a day (and indeed was doing do so around the time you were having your masturbation session recorded above), that characterisation doesn't make much sense. I didn't mention it at the time because I didn't anticipate the degree to which emotional incontinence and masturbatory grandstanding were going to dominate the discussion.
if you put a gun to someone's head, he would be able to stop
it isn't as simple as this btw, idiot
― brimstead, Friday, 15 December 2017 16:21 (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
It actually is that simple. If you can successfully threaten someone to stop doing something, then clearly they are doing it in the first place of their own volition and not because of an illness that they can't control.
wins otm
Addicts also feel shame for what they do and how it affects their family, no need to demonize the addict
Glad there's some reasonable responses here
― In a slipshod style (Ross), Friday, 15 December 2017 17:50 (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
The reason addicts feel shame about what they do is because they - unlike the majority of people on here who infantilise them - recognise the self-inflicted nature of their situation. Otherwise, what you are saying is an argumentfor addicts of being of sound mind, not the opposite.
people literally go through physical hell, intense pain, vomiting etc etc withdrawing off opiods
― Joan Digimon (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, 15 December 2017 16:31 (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
chronic alcoholics get the shakes when they don't have alcohol in their system
― Joan Digimon (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, 15 December 2017 16:32 (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
Joan, the examples you mention show that addiction, at a certain level, can lead to a situation in which refraining from consuming a certain drug is highly unpleasant, but even here the compulsion doesn't become uncontrollable, which I think would be a necessary basis for it to be considered an illness. Again, to observe this isn't to diminish the hideousness of the experience, but the distinction is a necessary one for the sake of accurate analysis.
― Freedom, Friday, 15 December 2017 18:41 (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
", but even here the compulsion doesn't become uncontrollable,"
you are a true idiot with little to no firsthand experience with addiction, clearly.
― akm, Friday, 15 December 2017 18:46 (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
Apart from this being the deeply smug dismissal of a plain empirical truth, it is interesting to note that both akm and brimstead both called me an idiot, but did so for reasons that directly contradict one another. Brimstead said that I'm an idiot for saying that because addicts have agency in what they do, addiction shouldn't be considered an illness, because apparently it isn't that simple. (In other words, brimstead accepts implicitly that addicts do have agency.) Akm on the other hand called me an idiot for arguing at all that addicts have agency. While holding to my view of the impenetrable bigotry of most people on here about this subject, I would be genuinely curious to know what the consensus is about this, as these positions plainly cannot both be true.
There are extreme cases with, for example, the DTs, where withdrawal literally can be fatal, but those cases would, I think, be the exception.
― Freedom, Friday, 15 December 2017 18:45 (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
why does it being fatal or not make any difference?
― Joan Digimon (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, 15 December 2017 18:49 (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
It would have been good to elaborate on this at the time, but from the initial responses to it I saw that I was dealing with a quite uniquely insufferable group of people, so opted to bow out. To reiterate, I believe addiction isn't an illness because I think (based primarily on my own experience as an alcoholic) that addicts fundamentally do not lose their agency over the course of their addiction. In this instance, I was entertaining the idea that circumstances where alcohol withdrawal is potentially fatal might be a possible exception to this rule; because this is one circumstance in which a genuine claim for the necessity of the continued use of a substance could be made, rather than it being merely something that one might choose to do to provide a soft landing back into full abstinence. However - and this is something that became more clarified for me as I myself started to experience increasingly terrifying symptoms - this is the wrong way of looking at it. In such circumstances, you don't lose agency and if it may be advisable to continuing drinking to slowly wind down your consumption, you are doing so essentially to treat a kind of physical sickness that is a consequence of deliberate subsequent abuse, rather than treating addiction as such. Moreover, insofar as, as with withdrawal symptoms in general, the only ultimate solution is abstinence, its function is inherently transitional. The notion of addiction as an illness implies an abiding condition and this is plainly not that. Notwithstanding these intricacies, the fundamental point is that none of this contradicts my view that addiction as a mental illness, bringing into being an uncontrollable impulse to take a substance, does not exist.
Not so long ago (subsequent to the discussion above, but a healthy distance from the present moment), I hit more or less rock or bottom in my alcoholism. My intake of a given day was sometimes reaching the equivalent of six bottles of wine. I was becoming increasingly physically strung out; almost any ordinary task required the most monumental mental and physical effort; I was having a panic attack on a daily basis; I was drinking myself to sleep, which would last rarely more than two hours before I'd wake again. I eventually stopped and on my first day of withdrawal, my tremors were so bad I thought I was going to go into convulsions on several occasions. In the end, it took me about three weeks to return to some kind of physical normality. In this period I was recovering from the physical damage caused by self-inflicted alcoholism; I wasn't recovering from addiction. I had spent several years wildly over-indulging in alcohol of my own volition, and I paid the price. For sure, I had my "demons" that drew me to alcohol; but ultimately, whatever the terrors and torments that were consuming my mind, I drank because I could, not because I had to. I have all the same demons now that I had then; but I'd rather put up with them than drink, because I don't want to return to the same hellish situation (or worse). If addiction were truly an illness, truly an uncontrollable impulse, the idea that you could be deterred from it by a bad experience would be plainly absurd. I could explain away my drinking of the last several years by saying that it was an illness that I couldn't really control; or I could admit the truth, which is that if the same physical meltdown had happened to me 2 or 3 or 4 years ago, I would have been motivated to stop then as well. I really liked doing it, and I wanted to continue doing it; and as such I was inclined to test how much I could get away with. I was lucky that the consequences weren't worse than they were. That is the reality of addiction.
Fwiw I took your point straight away about valid emotional response re ppl caught in the fallout, as long as we all agree "freedom" is a dumb cunt it's all good 🙂
― sonnet by a wite kid, "On Æolian Grief" (wins), Friday, 15 December 2017 18:58 (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
Charming.
I didn't say that it being fatal or not was the key factor; I was just giving an extreme example of where the label of illness might be applicable.
Unfortunately the posting of dictionary definitions is really only acceptable in the imbecile forums you need to fuck off to, but: you do not know what "illness" means
― sonnet by a wite kid, "On Æolian Grief" (wins), Friday, 15 December 2017 19:02 (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
Given that, as I've illustrated, the bulk of the criticisms of my views on this thread consist of incoherent bullshit pieties punctuated with insults, that's pretty rich. I partially misspoke once, if even that. Meanwhile, for example, the semi-literate brimstead can barely form a coherent sentence, and receives no criticism, because mindless drivel is fine so long as it's in the service of the consensus dogma.
there's no problem shutting down conversations when it's just concern trolls/bad faith
― brimstead, Friday, 15 December 2017 19:24 (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
I can almost see this piece of human filth snivelling while typing.
it's ok to not have an opinion on things you don't fucking understand
― brimstead, Friday, 15 December 2017 19:26 (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
Yes, the only people who truly understand addiction are not those who actually have personal experience of it, but rather those who can most sanctimoniously parrot conventional wisdom about it.
that's what i assumed based on some of these posts, but i shouldn't assume things about posters i know nothing about. people that are addicts or who have addicts in their lives often express similar sentiments, and rightfully so. it's fucking horrible and confusing. BUT if you have no real experience in it I stand by my statement: Fuck off
― flappy bird, Friday, 15 December 2017 19:30 (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
If brimstead takes the medal for obnoxiousness, this post takes it for incoherence. If addicts and people close to addicts "rightfully" say these things, then you agree with me and think the consensus on this thread is wrong. But for some reason I also need to fuck off for saying what you accept is the truth about addiction. The fact that in the wake of all the bile directed at me, not a single word of criticism was made of this post is yet another indication of the total vacuity and mindlessness of the consensus stance on here. Contrary to flappy bird, I think the attitude here can be summed up something like this: "Whether you have experience with addiction or not, either accept our infantilising, pseudo-compassionate view of addicts, or fuck off. Alternatively, if you don't accept it, disguise this by telling anyone else who doesn't to fuck off."
you should stop caring about this!
― brimstead, Friday, 15 December 2017 16:22 (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
This really sums up it up. It's almost as if the truth about this subject doesn't even matter; displays of piety and general bluster are everything.
That is all.
― Freedom, Tuesday, 11 December 2018 02:11 (five years ago) link
one month passes...