Addictions and Mental Illness: We Need To Stick Together

published on December 4, 2017 by Guest blog by Angie Hamilton in Mind You

A response to Marvin Ross and Dr. David Laing Dawson

Thank-you Marvin Ross for this opportunity to respond to your article Addictions and Mental Illness Do Not Belong Together and Part Two of that article by Dr. David Laing Dawson.

PART 1

In your article you state that addictions are quite separate from mental illness but that, for some inexplicable reason, addiction has been lumped in with mental illness.

However, the reality is that they occur together more often than not. How is it possible to separate addiction and other mental health conditions? Dr. Kim Corace, a psychiatrist at The Royal in Ottawa, recently presented a paper at the Issues of Substance Conference by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA) entitled “Opioid Use Disorder in Youth: Mental Health Comorbidities and Treatment Outcomes”. It showed that 100% of the youth with opioid use disorder also had depression, 70% had anxiety and many had other co-occurring mental health conditions. In my experience attending support groups for parents of addicted youth for over three years, all of the teenagers had co-occurring mental health conditions (although statistics usually range from 70% to 90%).

Numerous studies point to the overlap between addiction and other mental health conditions and we are not, as yet, able to determine causation. Did self-medication of the other conditions lead to addiction or did addiction cause the other conditions or did something else lead to both?

Your article also states that lumping addiction in with mental illness does a disservice to the mentally ill because addiction, at some point, involved a choice whereas there is no choice involved for schizophrenia, bipolar or depression. It is true that, at some point, addiction involved a choice to use an addictive substance. With respect to alcohol, it is a decision that has been made by 80% of Canadians. When you add in prescribed medications that can lead to addiction it is a decision that maybe all Canadians have made. There are many patients who have become dependent on, or addicted to, painkillers taken as prescribed by their doctors. Rather than vilify people for making a choice that most of us make, it would make more sense to ask “Why do some people who use an addictive substance become addicted and others do not?”