There was recently a flurry of commentary around two articles discussing the causes for addiction. The article that started this wildfire conversation was “The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think” by Johann Hari. Relying heavily on a 1980 “Rat Park” experiment focused on morphine addictions, Hari presented a premise that addiction is caused by a lack of positive “bonding,” much of which is the result of the addicted person not feeling connected in their environment.
The Hari article triggered quite a discourse among parents of addicted children who read “disconnected in their environment” as implicating parents and heaping much responsibility on them for their child’s addiction. As these comments were pretty intense and emotionally charged, I opted to wait, step back, and provide a more thoughtful response once the fire died down. Contained in this article are my thoughts.
Quite honestly, there was nothing in the Hari article or in his conclusions that left me with the sense that I am responsible for my son’s addiction. I completely agreed with his premise about addiction, environment and disconnectedness. (please, read on before you react).
It is incredibly accurate and insightful to say my son felt disconnected from his world. As a result he sought to find something to feel better. It was a feeling of not being connected that started him on the road to his addiction. The “environment” my son was living in did not fulfill him and he felt empty and detached. It was that lack which sent him on a journey to a darker place, not a better place.
The point that was clearly missed by those condemning or criticizing the Hari article - My son’s environment was what he was struggling with, not the environment his parents created for him. While those environments are shared and overlap, they are two entirely different things.
My son’s environment is his school, home, family, friends, work, and the space between his ears! It was this environment and his lack of connection to it that drove him to look for something else, something better. Unfortunately, he found it in heroin and not in his parent’s love, his music, his athleticism, his friends, his faith or, most importantly, in himself. This is what I understood “environment” to be as I absorbed the premises in the Hari article; not some criticism for how I raised, educated, or loved him.
To help make these distressed parents feel better, a rebuttal article surfaced. This article was, “Looking for the likely cause of addiction won’t get you far” by Peg O’Connor. It didn’t take long for O’Connor to distance herself from any endorsement of the Hari article in saying “addiction is a highly complex set of phenomena that cannot be reduced to one cause, which means there is not one solution or treatment.” She also wisely posits, “as is always the case with articles and arguments (including my own right here), there is something right about them. And something wrong. It is always important to identify each.”
This past weekend I heard Dr. Drew Pinsky talk. When the Hari article was brought up in the Q&A session, Dr. Drew reiterated the same point, “I read the article. I agree with it. Is it accurate, yes! But, there is more to it than just that…”
Parents, your child’s addiction is not about you or how you raised your child or where you went wrong. Their addiction is a byproduct of many things, one of which is their environment and their sense of connectedness to it. This is not the result of a moral or parental failing.
What concerned me as I read all these defensive, angry comments is so many parents missed out on an opportunity to obtain a valuable insight. I understand the guilt and anguish we all feel at some point as we come face-to-face with addiction our family. Over time we all come to learn, that our children’s choices are theirs, not ours, and no matter how much we love, coach, inspire, or encourage they are still going to make their own decisions. The behaviors I observed in these responses reflected parents who were more afraid about having been bad parents, than they were in taking advantage of a lesson in how to be better parents.
Your child’s addiction is not about you!
No matter how normal, happy, perfect, or great the situation in the home environment, there is still a lot of external garbage that our children experience. Talking with them, listening to them, and paying attention to the perspective of educators relating to things we may not see or understand on our own provide us opportunities to be more attentive and proactive. We must be willing to understand and be sensitive to their world view. We often see what we want to believe. Sometimes what we see isn’t true reality, rather it is our definition of reality. The Hari article reminded us that the environment our children see and operate in, has real influence on their behaviors.
We learn best when we are presented with a perspective that makes us uncomfortable and challenges our way of thinking provided we engage in the learning process! Instead of finding a way to escape, denounce, dismiss or avoid the learning opportunity, lean in, explore, and find ways to understand and reflect on the information being shared. When you do this, you will always learn something in the process.
Parenting a child with an addiction is a difficult painful assignment. Raising, teaching, and loving an adolescent in this day is quite challenging. There is a lot of great information out there that can be of great value in this journey. Keep your eyes, your ears, your heart, and your mind open. Your child’s addiction is not your fault and it is not about you. It is a byproduct of their choices and decisions. No one is to blame and no one has the clear cut definitive answer to the problem. If you are suffering, hurting or confused remember there is a very large community looking to love, support, encourage, and learn from each other. Embrace all of it with an open mind and a forgiving heart and you will make great progress on your journey! Peace!
Rita Anne says
I have listened and heard and I agree with so much that has been written regarding this article. The comment I wish to make here is that This world suffers from a lack of LOVE/CARE in so many aspects and regards. This is at the very core of what promotes an environment of disconnectedness. As such we all have a duty to reach out be it a smile a silent prayer it is a giving of oneself in an unselfish act. Watching our minds to we do not develop Judgement of Others and their circumstances. Non of these take any effort at all just “an adjustment” to our attitude to others situations and circumstances. Even for our own sakes. ( I hear so many discussions about lack of community and related topics so it obviously matters to people) We all have a basic need to feel wanted and have a sense of belonging but shutting ourselves away in our own world/environment will not change anything. If every person made the commitment to smile at someone do a very small kind gesture just once a day the payback will be HUGE and the Miracle of the change we wish to see will be reflected back in far less time than we can imagine! Please Join me in making CARING the Center of our world again and a real valued quality of being a good citizen. Your best is good enough I am simply asking you to care just once a day. Is this really too much to ask? It won’t even cost you anything!
I agree with you. Much of the disconnectedness that we see in our children is the result of our own detachment and emptiness. Besides my commitment to help parents with their journey through the similar path I have found myself on, is my believe that everyone is looking for love, understanding, and kindness. We are all suffering in one way or another. The only way to heal that suffering is to begin from within through the giving and sharing of authentic, transparent,vulnerable self. Thank you for your comments!
Rita Anne says
Just an amendment to my notifications Apologies.
I am responding to Dave Cooke, a man I admire and consider a friend. We’ve shared similar, if not congruent, journeys with our sons. I respond here to Dave, but also to others who have read any or all of the essays and articles mentioned. I am NOT; repeat NOT attempting to start an argument with Dave here.
If I understand Dave correctly, or Peg O’Connor, or Dr. Drew, their message in response to the Hari essay is “Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.” Hari makes useful and valid points. Unfortunately the title of his piece is ill conceived. By stating that “The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered…” he both oversimplifies and misleads.
As a father who has lost a son to heroin addiction, I can vouch from personal experience to the complexity of the disease. No sooner had Hari’s article appeared in The Huffington Post than I had friends asking for my opinion of what Hari had to say. In turn, I corresponded with more friends and family about the article. One, Barry Walsh wrote the following, which I thinks explains nicely how Hari oversimplifies. Barry wrote me: “Anything as complex as addiction is multi variate. People like simple solutions - especially the press because it’s always move on to the next story… Some people have brains that are especially vulnerable to addiction and then there are all the psychological and environmental contributors. As a therapist for 40 years I’ve found people are more complex than rats … Thank god…”
The key to what Barry is saying, as do Dave and Peg O’Connor is that addiction is multi variate. Neither the cause nor the treatment for each and every individual are as simple or easy as we might like to make them. My son has been dead for over two years and our family still wrestles with identifying the various causes and actions that led to his overdose death. We’ll never know it all, but our attempt to gain clarity might help others. We do know there are things he could have done differently and things he had no control over. The same goes for his parents and those who treated him along the way. We might gain easy satisfaction in assigning blame. We do better to find out what we can learn from a personal tragedy, a tragedy becoming all the more common in other households in this country.
Unfortunately the bathwater with Mr. Hari’s baby is murky. He makes it difficult to spot the baby and hang on to it. What do I mean? He is a sloppy journalist. An easy trip to Wikipedia yields this: “Johann Eduard Hari (born 21 January 2026) is a British writer and journalist who wrote columns for The Independent (London) and The Huffington Post and made contributions to other publications. In 2011, he was suspended from The Independent after charges of plagiarism. He was also accused of making improper edits to several of his critics’ Wikipedia pages under a pseudonym. [2][3] The news led to his returning his 2008 Orwell Prize[4] and later was a contributing factor in his leaving The Independent.” We all make mistakes, and Mr. Hari has worked hard publicly at atoning for his. He says as much on the website for his new book Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs. In particular he and his publisher go to great lengths to document all his sources properly.
That said, I believe he is making some new mistakes. The Rat Park experiments were conducted and published in the late 1970’s. To suggest “the likely cause of addition has been discovered” leads readers to perhaps believe that the discovery is fresh, not work done 35 or more years ago. The Wikipedia entry for Rat Park includes the following: “The two major science journals, Science and Nature, rejected Alexander, Coambs, and Hadaway’s first paper, which appeared instead in Psychopharmacology, a respectable but much smaller journal in 1978. The paper’s publication initially attracted no response. [4] Within a few years, Simon Fraser University withdrew Rat Park’s funding.” To extrapolate from work done with rats decades ago to the likely cause of addiction is a leap of gigantic proportion.
Mr. Hari sidesteps mainstream science. Or current science. On his own website http://www.chasingthescream.com he refers to Bruce Alexander and Gabor Mate, both of whom he cites in his article, as “dissident scientists.” Nora Volkow, the current head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) rejected his request for an interview. I’d like to know more about that story. I think it is safe to say that NIDA’s research over the span of time since the Rat Park experiments is exponentially wider and more sophisticated than the evidence Hari marshals to support his claim. There are many places to hear Nora Volkow speak on addiction science. She recently spoke before the U.S. Senate Forum on Addiction and Collateral Damage. Go here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2uNoeB7AsA
Hari does attempt to incorporate NIDA into his argument by consulting Robert DuPont, the first director of NIDA. DuPont is a medical doctor, a psychiatrist. He served from at NIDA from 1972 to 1978 and was also the second White House Drug Czar from 1973 to 1977 under former Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. It was President Nixon who launched the War on Drugs, shortly before DuPont became Drug Czar. It is also worth noting that much of the brain imaging capability now being used to help understand addiction either did not exist or was in its infancy during DuPont’s tenure. I have no idea how conversant Dr. DuPont is with current NIDA research or how wedded he may be to the prevailing ideas of his time. It would be helpful to have some clarity in this regard.
On his book’s website Mr. Hari states: “I would be very happy to include the response of the current head of NIDA to these theories, alongside those of the previous head that are described here. I am keen to offer the fullest possible response, and to explore all sides of this really important debate about what causes addiction.” I submit that the greatest failing of his article, and indeed his book, is that he has failed in his exploration or, at the least, jumped too quickly to a conclusion. If we throw out the bathwater, we might want to give this baby a clean rinse.
Bill,
Even if you wanted to start an argument, my respect for you would encourage me to listen carefully and thus, we wouldn’t argue. Thanks for your thoughtful and passionate comments. More than anything there are two components you offer that I am complete agreement with..“Anything as complex as addiction is multi variate. People like simple solutions - especially the press because it’s always move on to the next story…” We love to make it simple, easy, and then move on. Addiction does not fall into this category of simplicity. Thanks for reminding us!
“We do better to find out what we can learn from a personal tragedy, a tragedy becoming all the more common in other households in this country.” Instead of finding a simple, easy out to a serious problem, we need to spend more time learning from our experiences and discovering how to bring an end to this misery. You know the ultimate pain of this disease more than most and I appreciate and respect your comments. Thank you!!