culture and illness

Marta Russell ap888 at lafn.org
Mon Jan 4 15:35:03 PST 1999


Alec,

I tried to post you offline (a ramsdell at yahoo.com) but the message gets returned as undeliverable. Please send me your correct email.

Marta

Alec Ramsdell wrote:


> I think my last post regarding psychiatry only addressed one side.
> Obviously alcoholics and addicts deserve state-funded treatment, and
> treatment can work, even if the high statistics for post-treatment
> relapse might lead one to serious doubts. This isn't possible now, of
> course, since Clinton removed addiction and alcoholism as categories
> of disability.
>
> My criticism of addiction treatment is that it is too quick to accept
> the medical model of addiction, before other possible disabling
> conditions. Again, an addict should be entitled to treatment. But
> what if a patient is an alcoholic self-medicating for another
> condition? In this case mis-treatment can have devastating
> consequences. I do know addiction is complicated, serious and real.
> But the medical model of treatment at this current historical moment
> seems way off, and headed down a dangerous path, towards
> "anti-addiction" neurological implants and all that truly scary stuff.
>
> This is all setting aside more systemic questions of material
> conditions and social relations.
>
> Marta, do you think the medical model of addiction, with all its
> trappings of the essentialized disease model, and with its possible
> subsuming of other conditions, is in step with the way disability as a
> category is kept flexible for the sake of economic and political
> interests, as you write about in your book?
>
> -Alec
>
> _________________________________________________________
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