There can be few jobs so rewarding as helping young addicts to escape their shackles. Since my breakdown I have taken time to look in to mistakes I made, way back when I was their age, and using insight gained try to help.
In contemporary treatment the language used can have a destructive effect. One example is the use of the term 'clean' for someone who is no longer taking drugs. Many of the individuals I meet have spent their whole lives being told they are bad. Being encouraged to describe their abstinence as being clean implies that they have been unclean, dirty. When you are dealing with young people with damaged self esteem language like this further marginalizes them.
Another popular thought is to consider addiction a disease. Whilst it is true that you can create physical dependence in anyone by dosing them thrice daily with heroin this is not the part that we have problems with. Often addicts find no great hardship in kicking the drug in prison. Yes, they suffer but knowing there is no choice changes things. Once they get out is where the problems begin.
Addiction is negative habitual behavior. This makes it worse in many ways to disease. Having to change the individual through their own volition is far harder than curing disease.
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