Through over three decades of rehabilitating drug addicts, alcoholics, people with behavioural disorders, DAIRRC has realised that general ignorance about the subject is what has led to Addiction becoming a misconstrued term. There are serious stigmas and taboos associated with the issue of addiction, especially female addiction in India.
The truth is that addiction is a chronic mental disease involving hereditary genetics, environmental conditioning, an individual’s character traits, life experiences, mental and physiological states, all of which contribute to the development of compulsive behaviour. These compulsive behaviours lead to a need for pleasure and stimulation, with total disregard to the harmful consequences addiction can cause.
It is a disease, whose patients can be treated successfully through rehabilitation, and DAIRRC’s success ratio is testament to the fact.
DAIRRC further reports that in India, there is a tendency to treat addiction as a taboo and be ignorant especially when it comes female addiction. This stems from a fear of social ostracisation, as well as to fend off dissolution of the girl’s matrimonial prospects.
Very often, in families where both brother and sister are addicts, the parents prefer to send only the boy to a rehab. The girl’s addictive traits will always be kept hidden. ‘After all who will marry her if they come to know that she’s an addict?’ --- is the constant refrain.
Lets look at some myths and realities pertaining to addiction in India:
Myth: It is cool to do light drugs like marijuana or have alcohol.
Reality: Both marijuana and alcohol have the capacity to alter the brain’s circuitry and cause long term brain damage. Besides, both are gateways to harder drugs and alcoholism in the long run
Myth: Prescription drugs are safe.
Reality: Sedatives, pain killers, cough syrups and the like are highly addictive and are therefore issued only by prescription, to ensure that the person stops consuming them after the need subsides. Since all prescription drugs target a specific area of the brain, abusing them leads to serious damage and can cause irreversible mental problems. Recovery also takes longer in these cases.
Myth: People who do drugs and alcohol are bad people.
Reality: Alcohol and drug abuse tend to alter the brain’s chemistry to such an extent that addicts start experiencing pleasure only after consuming the drug and alcohol. The addict will go to any length to procure their substance of choice, and at times end up doing deeds that are horrible in nature. This is purely out of compulsion since they have lost the capacity to discriminate between right and wrong. Alcohol and drugs bring out the devil in an addict, remove the substance and the angel appears again.