Our Relationship to Addiction | Steven Slate | TEDxTahoeCity

I'm going to tell you something shocking today you got a taste of it from mark what I'm gonna say is the addiction treatment and everything that we're doing to help those we call addicts isn't curing them it's creating them for the most part I study this and I've lived it I was a heroin user for eight years I love to heroin a lot of that time I really liked using it but ironically when it got bad and when I started to hate it but I was still doing it was right after I got treatment that's when I took a massive turn and I know that this defies a lot of people's expectations well actually I know probably there's a lot of you in the audience also that know somebody they went away to get help and came out worse but generally most people think this treatment thing is supposed to help people right I'm going to introduce a principle related right to that last talk that you heard that explains maybe why treatment and our approach of telling people to have a disease doesn't really work think about when you take your nephew niece your son whoever to the playground and you know he's running around acting like a maniac like an animal uh hanging upside down on the jungle gym like I know I definitely did fell flat on my back um and the kid falls he hurts his knee and he generally is just gonna you know nurse that wound for a minute out you know get up and start running around like a maniac all over again you know that's one way the scenario plays out another way is that you're looking on in terror freaking out thinking that he's got the worst injury ever and then he looks up and makes eye contact with you what happens anybody he cries right goes actually in literally insane goes nuts start screaming running over to you it's like the totally completely different reaction complete opposite you conveyed to him that this was a disaster this minor injury is a disaster and then he goes any experiences as a disaster now he could have experienced it as a minor injury right we brought new meaning to it so as we raise our kids generally in all kinds of realms we're trying to build them up we cheer them on when they you know fall taking their first steps we're like you took a few steps that's great you know when they say the wrong words as they're learning to talk we're just happy that they're learning to talk but when it comes to drugs we jump in there and we say oh my god you've done drugs you're enslaved you're wrecked for the rest of your life and this is a lifelong struggle you can't overcome this you need to be in help of some kind for the rest of your life whether that's going to some meetings or going to ongoing counseling or whatever it is or if it's just daily making sure that you don't encounter triggers or get any stress I mean I don't know how anybody manages to not get stress um but that's the thing that they tell you in treatment is make sure you don't get stressed because you'll relapse okay great most people who use drugs one year the heavy drugs don't use it again the next year and then of the ones that do they don't really get addicted but of the ones that we call addicted all right nine out of ten of people diagnosis addicts eventually get over their problems they resolve their problems and the other thing we need to know is 9 out of 10 people that we call addicts don't get treatment I want you to think about that nine out of ten get over it nine out of ten don't get treatment we always hear this statistic that only 1 in 10 get the treatment they need is if that's a tragedy but several epidemiological studies since the 80s have showed again and again and again that most everybody's getting over it and when you work out the ages it goes up with a age it's not a chronic thing people don't keep relapsing for the rest of their lives 90% of alcoholics will resolve their problem 97.2% of marijuana addicts will get over it ninety nine point two percent of cocaine addicts will get over their problems people get over this yet we think they can't get over it without treatment and when it comes to heroin right that's the one I'm going to talk about because that's what I did recent studies found that 96% of people had resolved their heroin problems if you go back to the 1970s we had this famous one on Vietnam addicts that Vietnam vet heroin addict so you might have heard and ninety-eight percent of them didn't get treatment yet only 12% relapsed within those first few years but of that tiny group that got treatment 67 percent of them relapsed they had this totally different result for the ones that we gave treatment okay um what we see is following treatment people binge more they struggle for longer they have higher relapse rates but basically treatment is like that concerned parent on the playground people come in and you give them that look and you say you're really in for it and and you know most the time when they come in they say I can stop whenever I want we're saying no you can't that's denial you can't really stop you don't really want to do this what you're doing right now right because when somebody says it can't stop that's what they're saying so let me tell you about when I went to rehab this is what happened they waged that relentless campaign to convince me that I wasn't in control and then when I wasn't in the in the sessions they would send all the other patients the experienced patients right the lifers that were back there again to come talk to me because you know that was part of their work to help you know somebody else that's supposed to get them sober at this point right so they come around to tell me these are guys it could be my father uh you know they're that age I was 21 they were in their 40s 50s and they're saying if you don't admit to that you're powerless now you're going to end up like us they said you're going to be shooting up soon just watch everybody shoots up okay and they gave me all these dire predictions that's when I always locked on to because after rehab I started shooting up within a week of leaving and I had been a nasal heroin user for three years before that and it was a line I wouldn't cross and I got this prediction in rehab and I lived it out in rehab they told me how horrible with that withdrawal is well I had used heroin intermittently gone off it gone through withdrawal several times and it was bad it was painful but I never experienced it as compulsion to use but these guys in rehab all talked about how build anything to use when they're going through withdrawal anything so what did I do when I got out I did anything to get heroin whenever I went through withdrawal I robbed from my parents like of everything that they had I shop lifted I wrote bad checks I did whatever I had to do to go get heroin that dude it was like day and night three years before I used intermittently on and off I felt in control it was problematic for sure I'm not saying it wasn't but then for the five years after rehab I was I ended up homeless for a little while I got arrested countless times I ended up in jail for a little while I mean you name it all of that bad stuff that we know about I became that junkie stereotype and I felt hopelessly addicted that whole time I believed basically the rest of my life was going to be a struggle and I learned that in rehab that's where I transformed I learned to think of myself as an addict and to have an addict identity that became my reality and uh it's just like the parent on the playground looking at had I reinterpreted what I was going through I really liked heroin I learned to interpret that like as a compulsion as something foreign so I just dropped a big bomb I said I'm in control of heroin use right and a lot of you are shaking your heads or you're shaking your heads mental exile antennae shaking hands this is heresy right because heroin opiates they're super addictive right to say that people are in control of you their use that's crazy they've been around since 4500 BC with the Sumerians okay opiates have been the most popular drug in history only until a couple hundred years ago nobody talked about being addicted to them but plenty of people over time got physical dependence on opiates went through withdrawal on their own without treatment and every day people come out of the hospital physically dependent on morphine as much as a street hariom heroin user is and then they go through withdrawal on their own and they're fine okay this is because they don't think of themselves as addicted so they don't feel compelled this famous sociologist Alfred Lynn Smith went to study opiate addicts to find out what is it that makes them addicted this was back in the 1940s it was a landmark study and basically what he found was that there was a process of learning and belief and everybody found that became an addict he tells case after case after case of stories where there they were using and then they stopped and they were going through withdrawal and some well-meaning friend or doctor says oh you're hooked and then they start to think of themselves as a junkie go oh I need more I need more heroin or opium or whatever it is and they go get it and they relieve the withdrawal and then they start to learn that oh my god I am this monster you know and they take on this self-image so again that's the parent on the playground sending this message that you don't have withdrawal you know basically you need to know this about withdrawal is that it's almost identical to the flu it feels exactly like a bad case of the flu but then we learn to interpret it as this compulsion to go use so it gets turned into this fatal thing by a fatalistic concept I just I hate these concepts I felt them change me I also hate that people died of overdoses and have friends several friends who died of overdoses so I don't it's not to downplay the danger what Lynn Smith found was that naivety to the concept of addiction is what actually protects people from it and right now we're doing the exact opposite we're telling people watch out don't let your doctor give you those pain pills because you're going to turn into an addict and I I'm going to stop I'm going off my script now I'm going to tell you in April I got a tonsillectomy and I'm 40 years old and it's a bad and it's horribly painful to get a tonsillectomy at that point um and the doctors put me on a dozen percocets a day and I took a dozen percocets a day for two weeks I didn't like the feeling and then I stopped taking them and I didn't relapse and you become an addict it's been 14 years since I've done any heroin you know and there's always this thing oh it's the drug it's it's not okay so people are in control of their substances it's really in the mind now there's obviously so the rehabs directly teach this stuff the treatment programs do but all of us are teaching it we put substance users in a corner where they're practically forced to start thinking of themselves as addicted through tough love and intervention okay we say we're going to take away your place to live we're going to take away you know finances love you can't visit your nieces nephews we're going to take away child custody all these things unless you go to this place that teaches you to think of yourself as addicted unless you take on this identity and degree that you can never touch a drop of alcohol or a hit of a drug ever again right and so we're incentivizing them to go in there and come out and say yeah I'm powerless and I learned really fast in treatment that I'd better say that okay really fast you learn that because guess what your probation officer is going to get a report your parents are going to get a report and if you hold on to any idea that you're in control of yourself you're in denial and you're not going to get a good report so you start to talk the talk and you start to recast your pass as being in out of your control you do this hindsight reasoning on substitutes like oh yeah I don't like that I crashed my car so that therefore I didn't like drinking you did like drinking at the moment when you drink you know so we incentivize that people talk this talk because they're going to lose things we all the other thing that we do is we stigmatize it you know some we don't understand we look at somebody who is losing all this stuff over drugs or alcohol I don't understand that it must be a disease it's that would be like looking at somebody who's homosexual and saying I you know I don't understand it's a disease and by the way we did that historically right and looking at women who want to vote or have a job and we tell them they have hysteria and then they start to manifest all these other symptoms of hysteria um we need to just accept that some people have different wants than us because when we don't right when they learn that it's not accepted what they want their wants are wrong and they think they're a monster they start to disown those wants mentally and that's the process of learning this think of this as a foreign force the disease model is untrue people aren't compelled if you take alcoholics into a laboratory and you somehow sneak alcohol into their drink without them knowing they don't proceed to crave and drink uncontrollably if you take drug addicts into a laboratory you give them meth and you say I'll give you 20 bucks or another hit of meth and just so you know they're getting the 20 bucks later they will choose the 20 bucks almost most of the time there's all these experiments like that that shows that people are choosing it's elements of choice that are involved not disease and then this hijacked brain thing is just way off because we are not going into people's brains with scalpels at most the time are not giving them drugs they are quitting when their brain is at the height of being as adapted by drugs as it could be I want to tell you about how I changed right I went to a program that said throw everything out that you learned okay it was called the st. Jude retreat and they said you don't have a disease you're in control you're doing this because you like it you can stop I did it happened almost overnight and that was in 2002 and I don't struggle I don't do anything to maintain sobriety okay I work for them now I've been working for development for them for the past five years we have a model we call the freedom model and it just says heavy substance use is just a preference it's like every other choice in the world people choose what they believe is going to work for them in the moment sometimes that's ugly like when people are indebted relationships or bad jobs and everybody else can see it and say why don't you get out of there and the person doesn't stop doing it because they think it's the best option have at this moment and with heavy drug use it's the same thing okay you know so basically I teach people you can just throw these ideas out all that information is available out there for free like Mark said he found that information and it helped him I want all of you to consider this maybe adopt some of these ideas really think about this it's compassionate to you don't just need a disease model to be compassionate and if we all get on board with just saying hey it's all right you can want what you want if you want to change that we can talk about what make might make you happier but we don't have to freak out slap this label on people and tell them that they're screwed for the rest of their life most of them tell us they don't think that they're out of control and they don't need treat and guess what most of them get over this without that treatment system know that that's all I have for you today I went over thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 68,073

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Health, Behavior, Ideas, Identity, Mental health, Personal growth, Psychology, Relationships, Self improvement, Self-help

Id: hBMUPgwLaO0

Length: 18min 11sec (1091 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 15 2016