Addiction is Nothing to Take Lightly

It’s difficult for people to understand addiction is nothing to take lightly, especially when it’s a young person in early addiction. Even those who are older don’t quite understand the serious nature of addiction. It does no good to hammer the point home when someone is just beginning to ask to help. A 19 year old girl in early addiction won’t respond very well to warnings that addiction will kill her, at least in the beginning of treatment. Not that addiction can’t lead to an early death, it’s just something very difficult for a young person to perceive when they’ve just started experiencing consequences and still feel relatively healthy.

In the beginning of treatment, a 40 year old might even have a hard time truly understanding that addiction kills. When someone with an addiction disorder has not had a close brush with death, they feel as if they haven’t gone so far that death is a concern. It’s easy to look up the statistics regarding premature deaths caused by addiction, but statistics don’t always convince people. I don’t like to think of all the people I’ve known through working in treatment, and in my extended family, who’ve died prematurely from the consequences of addiction. 

Outside my family, the first person I knew through treatment who died early was Billy, an 18 yr old young man who was one of my clients in an inpatient facility. Billy loved music and played the guitar in his room every chance he had. Billy wrote songs and could sing fairly well. He had come to the facility because he was addicted to heroin. Sometimes, in some people, addiction advances slowly and can take years before there are serious problems, and in others the addiction advances quickly. Billy was the type in which addiction advanced quickly. The problem was Billy didn’t accept his addiction was that serious. He snuck out of treatment one night — three days later he was hospitalized due to an overdose – a day later we heard he was brain-dead — a few days later we heard Billy was dead.

I could add many more stories – the suicides, the car wrecks while drunk, cirrhosis of the liver at 45, young people, middle age, older, on and on. There are many, many recovery stories, too. I often wonder why some get it and recover and others don’t. It would help if society understood the serious nature of addiction and there weren’t still antiquated ideas floating around promoted by people who just don’t have a clue. I try to convey to clients, in different ways to diverse types of people,  addiction is serious, and it has to be taken seriously at any age. Addiction is nothing to take lightly.