You may have noticed that it’s been a bit quiet around here, due to temporary shifts in my life that have made me busier than usual. Now that summer’s here, though, I’m not only making a return to regular blogging, but adding a few new segments to help explain the mysteries and confusions around addiction. Starting this week, be on the lookout for regular Addiction News link round-ups, both here and on our office Twitter feed. Next Monday will also be the beginning of a series of articles taking an in-depth look at different kinds of addiction, and behaviors that blur the line between true disorder and just bad habits. I’ll announce more details soon!
For today’s post, I want to talk about something that’s absolutely everywhere, something that everyone talks about — even people who would never otherwise spare a thought for addiction in their entire lives. I’ve spent the past week doing researching, looking for a suitable topic for today’s post, and everywhere I went on the Internet, I kept coming upon the same thing; celebrity addictions. There’s no escaping the fact that, when our culture talks about addiction, we do it largely in the context of Nicole Richie, Matthew Perry (of Friends fame), Ozzy Osbourne’s children (and of course Ozzy), Jamie Lee Curtis, Eminem, and of course Michael Jackson.
Those aren’t separate links; that article gives a synopsis of each one of these celebrities’ battle with addiction, and goes on to list four more pages’ worth of admired singers, actors, writers, and directors who have struggled with painkiller addictions. And this article only focuses on painkillers; I’m sure you can think of an endless list of celebrities addicted to alcohol, nicotine, opiates, barbituates, and etc.
We all know this story. And it is a story, a cultural narrative, that we tend to apply to these stories of celebrity drug use whether the celebrity’s life fits into the story or not. This article on Drew Barrymore’s recovery from alcoholism is fairly standard, until the last two sentences: “[..][T]hey couldn’t beat Drew into the recovery mold. And that’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Before we can know whether it’s a good thing, we need to know what “the recovery mold” means. The writer seems to be implying that the “mold” is the Total Abstinence method of recovery, but we could also see the “mold” as being the normal celebrity-addiction story, which is a continual roller coaster of rehab and self-destructive relapses.
We know this story. What I want to say today is why this story is not a good model for understanding addiction as it occurs in the day-to-day lives of people in the real world.
It’s almost painfully obvious to say that our society has a double standard between celebrities and non-celebrities. That’s almost the definition of a celebrity. Nowhere is this double standard more apparent than in addiction. For one thing, celebrities largely escape the stigma of addiction — the accusations of being weak, lazy, or morally bankrupt that anyone who has suffered from addiction is all too familiar with. In every article on celebrity addiction, the writer goes to great lengths to give reason and excuses for the addiction — injuries, pressures, lawsuits, divorce. While all these things are common ways for addictions to begin, only in celebrities do they excuse the consequences of the addiction. For any ordinary person who has been raised on stories where addicted actresses are pitied for their divorces rather than scorned for their addictions, the scorn and disdain they may suffer due to their own addiction is a cruel shock.
Another part of the celebrity-addiction story is the implication that celebrity addiction is normal and understandable because of the unique stresses that go along with being famous. In music especially, addiction is seen as a routine job hazard and a result of “making it big”. What this can tell non-celebrities is that, because they do not have the stresses and resources of famous people, they are immune to famous-person diseases like addiction. Addiction comes in many, many forms, as many as there are addicts, and when we focus on the celebrity-specific kind, it at the expense of the quieter, less glamorous forms of addiction that millions of people suffer from. By sending the message in our culture that this is what “acceptable” addiction looks like, we add to the isolation and degradation of anyone whose addiction looks any different.
The first article that I linked, the one with the long list of celebrities, makes a note at the beginning that celebrities are not the only kind of addicts our culture talks about. The other kind is those with the most “unacceptable” kinds of addiction — that is, lower- or working-class people, often young males, who in addition to being addicts may be criminals or “bums”. These people receive the greatest possible stigma and scorn, often for the exact same behavior that is forgiven when the person behind it is rich and famous.
This dichotomy — between “good”, victimized celebrity addicts and “evil”, predatory working-class addicts — is something invented by our culture and reinforced in every story we tell each other about addiction and its causes. Just like every other dichotomy, it’s a shorthand that makes our big, complicated world easier to understand. But, like every other dichotomy, it does a terrible job of describing reality and often does more harm than good. The disease of addiction, like everything else, is more complicated than that.