In the last post we introduced Dr. Gabor Maté, who came to Port Hardy on November 15 to speak about "Healing Addictions with Compassion". In this post we will dig deeper into his talk and look at what causes addictions.
In North America we usually say that addictions are caused by one of two things: People just choose to be addicts (and we send them to jail for that choice), or we say it's a genetic disease passed on from the parents. Dr.Maté says there is a third explanation, which says that a person's history and society causes addiction. He says that we don't like to think that our society causes addictions, because then we will have to change society, and that is a lot of work.
Dr. Maté says it's clear that substances themselves aren't addictive. Lots of people can drink or do drugs once in a while and not be addicted. Lots of people can go shopping and not be addicted. But, for some reason, for some people some things become addictions. Why is this?
People become addicted to substances or behaviours because their brains aren't working properly. A healthy brain naturally produces chemicals which make people feel happy, comfortable, loved, curious, energetic, etc. A healthy brain has circuits which allow people to control their impulses, emotions and stress. When you are abused or hurt or neglected, your brain can respond by shutting off these chemicals.
So, when a person doesn't feel loved, and they find a drug that causes their brain to release those chemicals that make them feel loved, they become addicted. Dr. Maté says that addicts are self-medicating by finding ways to fake their brains into feeling good.
The way we can treat addictions, then, is by trying to heal the brain from whatever made it stop working in the first place. We can't focus only on the addiction. We also can't punish people for their addictions, because this causes more stress, more hurt, more pain, which only makes their addictions and other problems worse.
In the next post, we will take a closer look at how we can help addicts. Stay tuned!
- By Jessie Hemphill, Gwa'sala-'Nakwaxda'xw Communications Officer