Addiction and celebrities

Previously I have written about addiction and debt. While reading my own post by myself, I've asked this question, why do some celebrities tend to become addicts if addiction by itself has anything to do with debt at all? When writing this past short article, I was a little mad at 'authorities' who try to make this connection between debt and substance-abuse. While I understand the emphasis they put on addiction treatment and relapse, I really don't understand why they behave so minimalist.

Here is the fact, we have many addicted celebrities on earth who are rich, wealthy in a fact, and they can't escape relapse either. Maybe addiction treatments must concentrate on the history of one's addiction as much as the present of the addiction.

Here is a list of famous celebrity addicts. Here is how this web site makes its statement about this, which I think is true:

Drug and alcohol addiction knows no boundaries when it comes to social classes, wealth, ethnicity or status. Addiction is a part of every group of people everywhere.

This list of famous and celebrity addicts is by no means comprehensive. Sometimes it is helpful that people who are struggling with addiction know some famous names that have struggled or are struggling with the same issues. It helps one to not feel so alone in the process.

Addiction and debt

Relapse of addiction after treatment is related to debt, according to statistics. Personally, I don't believe in this however I am going to evaluate it anyway. In any psychological disorder, financial status of a person is really a factor in recovery and relapse. For the case of addiction, I don't think that this is more related in comparison to other psychological disorders. I think the effect is the same.

On the other hand, there is this huge industry about drug addiction recovery and they somehow try to inject a feeling of being inferior in comparison to a whole society.

I don't believe an addicted person is less worthy that a person who is infected with a disease. I think professionals sometimes put too much blame on addicts.

Debt is not unique to people who are suffering from drug addiction. Addiction is only a condition. Debt is a problem of the world.

Complicated nature of addiction

Social scientists, teachers, psychologists, psychiatrists pay a great deal of attention to understand the nature of addiction. It is complicated because it is a disease, it is psychological but also biological, it is also inherited as well as cultural.

If you take the opportunity to visit a rehabilitation center and talk to several people, you would see that almost all of them have different reasons for their addictions. This is even so for a simple alcohol addict or a caffeine addict or a cigarette smoker.

The image of an addict in our minds that comes mostly from Hollywood movies does not reflect the truth. Like it is in homosexuality, you cannot always look to a person and say "yes, this is an addict" or "no this person is not an addict".

Parents of teenagers also feel this difficulty when to tell their children have a drug addiction or not. If the child is not an addict and her parents insist on controlling her on substance abuse, this is another traumatic scene for the teenage. Without any addiction she is going to have other psychological disorders regarding trust, oppression, etc.

Due to this complicated nature of addictions, it is best to trust professional diagnosis and addiction treatment.

Antidepressants and addiction recovery

I would like to tell you about a very mild example. So mild that it cannot be compared to alcohol addiction or drug addiction. I'll talk about caffeine and nicotine addiction.

Several times in my life, I have use different antidepressants. I said different but all of them were ssri's. They were cipram (citalopram), lustral (sertraline, also known as zoloft in U.S.), effexor (venlafaxine) and lustral again.

On all of these, I had the same experience with my caffeine and nicotine addiction in the first couple of weeks. I needed less coffee and less cigarettes. Especially in weeks 2 to 8, I can clearly say that on some days, both cigarettes and coffee was seemingly too much to me. I couldn't drink and smoke at the same amount when I was not on antidepressants.

So, if this holds true for drug addiction treatment? I am not sure about it. I don't have a clue. I can just do reasoning. If your addiction relates to the serotonin levels in the brain, then antidepressants may rehabilitate your addictive behavior if not cure them.

On the other hand, this amateur reasoning of mine would not be valid for many other addictive substance. Maybe it may help if you are at the beginning of substance abuse and the substance abuse is just caused by your serotonin levels.

Drug and alcohol addiction treatment from a psychotherapeutic perspective

You can recover from drug addiction with the help of psychotherapy. Clinical psychology as a scientific method offers drug addiction treatment. However, psychotherapy is a little different in approach.

Both analytic and dynamic psychotherapy models can offer you treatment in a social context instead of a hardcore scientific context, pretty much as in Christian drug treatment.

The reason behind this is that psychotherapy - at least some schools of psychotherapy - in fact deals with abstract notions. In my previous post about religious approaches to addiction treatment, I stated that many contemporary drug rehab centers are based on the assumption that if the addicts social and psychological factors change, the addictive behavior will change accordingly. So, psychotherapy also stays in that perspective although it is different than a religious approach.

Every process of psychological counseling is not the same but I can still provide examples to explain what I mean.

Well, here is this addicted person that seeks addiction help. There are reasons that the person is addicted. One possible reason for that may be that the person doesn't feel that he or she is an adult person but still have feelings of childhood. The person feels as a child but her body is an adult. Suppose that this person has nobody around her to give her the care as if she is a child. Now, this person should find her way into something that will feed her childish, infantile feelings and starts dealing with addictive substances.

I know that the example is not really comprehensive enough but I just tried to show how a psychotherapist would establish his assessment for addiction treatment. It is an abstract establishment. It is a different framework to understand her tendency to addictive substances. It is about reasons and bringing the reasons to one's consciousness so that he or she can deal better with them.

One drawback of such a psychotherapeutic process is that it takes time. It usually takes years to recover. Moreover, a talk therapy usually consists of weekly counseling, one hour per week. This may not be enough for an agitated person. If the status of addiction is very high then hospitalization or a drug rehabilitation center would help more.