Addiction Isnt Stupid Why Stigmas Arent The Cure

Addiction Isn't 'Stupid' Why Stigmas Aren't The Cure Photos Via News.com.au and Google.com Homeless people are lazy. Online daters are desperate. Depression isnt a real disease. Rape victims deserved it. Drug addicts are stupid. Whether or not you agree with any of the following social stigmas above, there are many people in this world who do and, sadly, those people tend to speak the loudest. Following the death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, there has been a mass amount of disgusting responses to the drug-induced tragedy than simply acknowledging his passing or the unfortunate reality of drug addiction and overdose. In 2010 there was an estimated 22.6 million Americans over the age of 12 that were current or former illicit drug users within the last month of when the survey was given, equating to about 8.9 percent of the population. After receiving much backlash on Twitter and other social networking platforms upon the actors death, the nation still feels the need to justify death and why people get what they deserve. If Health is much more than  not being able to find something wrong but how its about what people feel as stated by Dartmouth professor Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, then why do we still treat drug addicts like they are sinners in the hands of an angry God and not as suffers of an actual psychological disease? Photo Via Jezebel.com Well, there may be two reasons for that: 1. Humans unintentionally regress back to common negative examples of drug addictions they have seen or heard of before, also known as blindly giving into the availability heuristic. 2. Humans constantly pit against one another in terms of who has it the hardest. Using this reasoning, a human isnt allowed to feel sad or depressed if someone else has it worse than them (you have an anxiety disorder? Well guess what, there are starving children in Africa, so youre not allowed to feel bad about your crippling anxiety disorder). Photo Via Dailymail.co.uk As a culture, we are conditioned to see genocide, rape and random murders as sad, because they most certainly are. What some people fail to recognize is that the meaning of sad can be extended to accommodate other issues that may be stigmatized to be not considered sad, such as alcoholism, failing out of school, poverty, and in this particular instance, drug addiction. To justify ones idea that something is not sad, one may use the relative privation fallacy, a fallacy that attempts to make a scenario better or worse by comparing it to the best or worst case scenario. Using this justification, nothing can ever be sad if its pinned up against the Holocaust or brain cancer. Photo Via Twitter.com The reason this current controversy is, dare I say, a somewhat positive example, is because it illuminates the reality of drug addiction and aids in spreading awareness of addiction via the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman. This in turn may promote others to recognize their own condition or the condition of anothers and people may consequently seek help. Many disapprove of publicizing celebrity mental illness and addiction because they believe it glamorizes their troubled and harmful lifestyles, but theres too much evidence backing up the increase of people seeking help after Demi Lovato spoke about bipolar disorder  and Magic Johnson announced he tested positive for HIV.  The key idea to opening up about these unspoken aspects of human health is to, in return, open up the minds of others to recognize the normalcy of these conditions and how seeking psychological and psychiatric help is not something to be ashamed of. If the average person takes a step back  to recognize Philip  Seymour Hoffman, or any celebrity for that matter, as a human being of flesh and blood and not a cardboard cutout at your local Regal cinema, the realization that addiction is a serious physical and psychological issue may become a deeper knife wound rather than a senseless or stupid paper cut.