Addiction As A Form of Suicide

Blog#213-8/25/24

ADDICTION AS A FORM OF SUICIDE
By
Richard Davis

I make no claim of being a therapist or an expert on human behavior. But when you have been around for nearly eight decades you do come to understand a few things. I have learned that people who are unhappy about the course of their lives, people, who feel they are trapped in their lives with no way out and people who feel that the world around them will not allow them to succeed, often turn to drugs and/or addictive behaviors to ease their pain.

This is not a judgment call but simply an observation. I suspect that if you were to do a survey among people who have turned to drugs or alcohol or who have any kind of addiction at the center of their life, you would find most of those people to be among the unhappy.

I am not making any excuses for these people and I would hope that our society continues to try to equalize the gulf between the have’s and the have-not’s so that more people have a chance to feel better about their lives. Local communities have little control over these bigger issues, but it is important for all of us to understand who we are dealing with when we talk about a group of people whose behavior we want to modify.

Addiction is not a “one size fits all” disease. There are as many forms of addictions as there are people who are addicted. Some of their behaviors are similar, but their stories are all different and that is something we need to respect. A single mother with three children who turns to heroin to ease her psychic pain has a different story than the man who feels he is trapped in a bad marriage and can’t deal with reality so he drinks himself into oblivion every night.

Researchers also have found evidence that there is a genetic component to addiction Studies I have looked at indicate that genetics may play a role in 40-50% of people with addiction problems. Those people who took Oxycontin after surgery and who had that genetic predisposition may have been content with their lives but became victim to their genetics.

There is one story that I came to know after living with someone for 35 years who was addicted to alcohol. My wife was a caring individual who felt she had to solve the world’s problems. She often told me that she carried the burden of being responsible for the happiness of everyone around her. That is a burden no one should carry, yet she was compelled to do so.

Over the years that burden caused her so much pain that she turned to alcohol. I also suspect there were other issues in her past that she never shared with me. That burden ended up killing her as her liver became so damaged that there was no hope for recovery. Watching someone die of advanced liver disease is not easy.

All of this rambling does have a purpose. My personal conclusion is that addiction can be a form of suicide. Some people find whatever pain they have so bad that they end things quickly by using guns or jumping off a building. I can’t imagine what that pain feels like.

There are others, like most of the people I have been referring to, who want to eliminate their burden but just can’t do it quickly so they kill themselves a little bit at a time. I think they do this slowly because they still harbor some degree of hope that things might get better and that they will no longer feel the need to use drugs or alcohol.

I remember the day that my wife finally realized that she had crossed a line with her disease that meant she would no longer be able to sustain any degree of hope. That was the day she said to me, “I’m going to die, aren’t I?” In my heart I knew she was right but I didn’t want her to give up and I gave her some lame answer instead of being honest.

Perhaps if we look at addiction as suicide we may consider it the emergency it is and do more to slow its course. Or are we powerless to eliminate the societal root causes of addiction and should we just accept the fact that addiction is part of life? I have no answers.