Addiction Is Not A Disease Essay

Over the centuries there has been much debate about what addiction is and what causes addiction. The way we live has changed so much over time that words and thoughts need to evolve with us. The concepts of both “disease” and “addiction” are examples of words whose meaning has changed over time and adapted to cultural contexts. In order to critically examine if addiction is a disease, we need to consider the concepts of addiction and disease and look for congruence between them. In addition, we should be looking at alternative explanations of addiction. In this essay I will discuss why addiction can be considered a disease, especially considering recent research into the neurobiology of addiction, but why that might also be a too simplistic view in consideration of alternative theories.

Before we can debate whether addiction is a disease or not, we need to first look at what addiction can be defined as. A simple oxford dictionary definition is “to be physically or mentally dependant on a substance.” If we were to look for a more in-depth explanation of the term addiction, we need to consider that it includes, behavioural elements as well as loss of control and suffering negative consequences (Sussman & Sussman, 2011). The American Society of Addiction Medicine (2011) defines addiction as a “primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry.” However, the standardised reference point for a mental disorder would be the DSM-V. The DSM-V was released in 2013 and contained changes to the criteria for Substance Use Disorders from the DSM-IV. The terms Abuse and Dependence were dropped, and all the criteria were combined, with a need for 2 or more criteria to be present, for Substance Use Disorder to be diagnosed. These