A father calls for more ways to treat drug addiction — even for those who don't want to be treated.
Ideally, people with addiction would seek care. But waiting for a person to choose treatment for a disease that affects rational thought can be catastrophic, now more than ever. |
 | | Cheyenne Goudswaard |
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I was like most people. I had an image of what "drug addicts" (the stigmatizing label we still use) look like. We pass by them lurking in parks, alleys and doorways. Some appear to be psychotic. Many are using drugs in the open. We avert our eyes. Those are "addicts." Not us, not our children. |
What I learned the hard way is that people who get addicted look like everyone, including my son. I was the parent of a child who was addicted to drugs and living on the street. From one day to the next, I didn't know if he would survive. This hell lasted for 10 years. |
One way I got through the hard days and nights was by writing about what my family was going through. Finally, when my son was doing better, I gathered the scribblings and wrote a book, "Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction." |
"Beautiful Boy" was published in 2008 and a movie adaptation starring Timothée Chalamet as my son and Steve Carell as me was released in 2018. I couldn't imagine America's drug problem getting worse after the movie came out, but it has. In 2021, more than 290 people died of an overdose every day, and that doesn't include other deaths caused by drug use, including homicides, automobile and other accidents, heart attacks, strokes, liver disease, kidney disease, and on and on. |
As I wrote in a guest essay for Times Opinion this week, I believe we can't just sit back and wait for people who are dying to decide to get help, because many never do. I learned from my son's experience that addiction can be a form of mental illness — substance-use disorder — and a symptom of some mental illnesses is lack of insight: When a person can't understand he's sick because the parts of his brain that are affected by his illness are the same ones that are responsible for self-awareness and motivation. |
For my essay, I researched evidence-based methods of getting people who don't necessarily want to be helped into treatment for addiction and related mental illnesses. I outline intervention strategies that can work, including one that helped my son. And, I argue, if the intervention doesn't work the first time, we must try again. And again. |
| READ DAVID'S FULL ESSAY HERE | | |
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