Solution Focused Harm Reduction by Seán Foy

Author:Seán Foy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Theories of Addiction

There are many theories of addiction . Some professionals are particularly wedded to specific approaches. This has in my experience been as a result of the professional being exposed to one particular theory and “sticking with it”, or it has been a person who has read a lot of literature and has made an informed decision on the way in which they view addiction. The other possibility is that the person, either layperson or professional, has “come through” a particular treatment and genuinely believes that the only way to achieve control over a substance is to do exactly what he or she has done. The reverse is also true; a layperson or professional may have “gone through” a particular treatment and views it to be fundamentally wrong as a result.

The analogy of a diet may be appropriate to discuss here for a brief time. There are hundreds of diets out there. Frequently there will be a new diet, which is supposedly much better than the last one. Of all the people who try a new diet, a proportion will not succeed. Is it reasonable to say to that person, “Just stay on this diet, it will change your life, you just need to stay on it and work it”? If the person refuses to stay on the prescribed diet they may be viewed as a failure, but if they manage to find the best diet for them, the one they feel may help, the one they think could actually work, maybe even one they invented for themselves, are they not successful?

One more interesting way of looking at treatment in general is in the story of a University Dean who looked out upon the lawn in front of his office and noticed that while the paths were around the lawn, the students were walking across the lawn. The dean had a visitor and lamented to this person that he could not keep the students off of the grass; he asked the visitor “What should I do?” The visitor answered, “Make the path where the people want to walk”. This is an example of any approach to addiction. We cannot prescribe what people need to do; we can work with people to determine their own unique destination and their way of achieving this.

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