A win
Religious programs intended to cure or manage addiction should never be forced on anyone, because they are religious (and religion should never be forced on anyone). One small step in that direction:
Health-care professionals who work in Vancouver-area hospitals and medical clinics will no longer be required to attend 12-step programs if they want to keep their jobs after being diagnosed with addiction.
The change comes as a result of a settlement between public health authority Vancouver Coastal Health and former nurse Byron Wood, who filed a human rights complaint alleging he was discriminated against as an atheist when he was fired for quitting Alcoholics Anonymous.
The settlement doesn’t allow him to talk about all the details.
But he did say Vancouver Coastal Health employees who require addiction treatment will now have a way of “meaningfully registering their objection” to 12-step programs.
They won’t have to attend AA and similar programs “if that approach to treatment conflicts with their religious or non-religious beliefs,” Wood said.
Which is good because 12 step programs don’t even work. Medication works, and it not only works, it takes the struggle out, because that’s what it does – it squelches the cravings. With 12 steps the cravings remain and you have to fight them. That’s the religious way to do things: painfully! Suffer, damn it, that’s what god wants!
The settlement could have implications in other professions and across the country. Researchers who study addiction treatment for health-care workers say it’s common for employees to be required to participate in 12-step programs in the interest of protecting public safety.
Which is idiotic seeing as how they don’t work.
Vancouver lawyer and workplace consultant Jonathan Chapnick said mandatory AA has long been the standard approach for workplace addiction issues in Canada.
“I think it makes sense for employers to look at something like this and do their own research and make their policy better reflect the research evidence that’s out there,” he said of VCH’s change in policy.
“Twelve step does not work for everyone. And, in fact, it doesn’t work for most people.”
Around 92%, I believe.
Six of AA’s 12 steps directly refer to God or a higher power, including one that requires members turn their will and lives “over to the care of God.”
“The 12 steps are a religious peer support group, not a medical treatment. They shouldn’t be imposed on anyone,” Wood said.
Especially when they don’t.even.work.
I remember when someone told me the higher power doesn’t have to be God. It can be anything, even a doorknob, she said.. So a person who doesn’t pray to any gods will be perfectly okay with praying to a doorknob? I don’t think so.
Against my better judgment, I did read a page or two of comments on the CBC page. It continually amazes me how AA evangelists (who I suspect are just a vocal minority among AA adherents) can simultaneously promote these conflicting ideas:
1) AA is the one and only true legitimate way to treat alcoholism. Secular alternatives to AA are bad, no good, won’t work, and just attempts by selfish arrogant atheists who don’t want to recognize a higher power.
2) AA doesn’t have to have any religious content, because AA is whatever you want it to be! The 12 steps are just suggestions, and the Big Book is just some people’s opinions, so don’t quote those as evidence of AA’s religiousity! Take what you want, and leave the rest. You can ignore any of the 12 steps, or reinterpret “God” to be “Group of Drunks” or “Good Orderly Direction” or a rock or a doorknob. Every AA group is different, so if the first 25 groups you visited were full of Jesus-pushers, you just needed to find that 26th group that is atheist friendly, just like mine is!
That said, there is some good pushback in the comments as well.
I think that AA’s virtual monopoly on alcoholism treatment is the product of two forces:
1) For all of the talk of alcoholism as a disease, there’s still a strong undercurrent of moral condemnation at work. Both addicts and non-addicts have a tendency to see it as a personal failing, and so what is effectively a spiritual treatment method rather than a medical one is still seen as appropriate.
2) 12-step programs are dirt cheap to provide compared to actual medicine. Sending someone to go sit in some church basement and drink bad coffee is essentially free. Of course, some addiction treatment programs are very expensive, but that’s because they’re set up to soak the rich while paying their unaccredited staff fuck-all.
I was thinking about the “For all of the talk of alcoholism as a disease, there’s still a strong undercurrent of moral condemnation at work” explanation. I think I have some of that undercurrent myself, and I feel guilt about it…and thinking about that it occurred to me that maybe it’s hard not to feel that way. Alcohol distorts people’s natures and behavior and everything, in a way that’s absolutely terrifying to a child. I speak from experience. Maybe I just literally can’t help feeling residual anger (and sorrow) about it, and that translates into an undercurrent of moral condemnation even though I know none of it was chosen. (AA was tried. AA was an utter failure.)
But then again…the AA bullshit makes me vastly more furious up here on the surface than any residual terror-anger underneath. Still, that might have something to do with the big picture. “You left me alone, you became someone else, someone unrecognizable and unavailable to me, it was horrible, and you did it over and over.”
For what it’s worth, I too have some reluctance to embrace the notion that alcoholism is purely a disease, with no moral implications, and I’ve been fortunate not to have any alcoholics in my immediate circle. (Which I guess means I’m either unbiased or uninformed, possibly both!)
My view is that, putting aside the term alcoholism for the moment, excessive alcohol consumption is a continuum rather than an on-off switch, and that people who find themselves slipping along that scale have a moral responsibility to correct it. Which for many people just means adjusting their consumption and moderating a bit. For others that may mean complete abstinence. But there can absolutely be moral blame of people who surely recognize that their drinking has made a mess of their lives and hurt people around them and yet have chosen to do nothing.
So, without knowing the specific circumstances you’re talking about, I wouldn’t say you should feel guilt.
Mind you, it’s only a small pinch when I think about that particular aspect of alcoholism and treatment. It’s not the tormenting kind of guilt. I reserve that for Trumpish behaviors.
Yes, I experienced being a child of an alcoholic, so I get that. I agree with Screechy, that I think there is a moral responsibility to correct it. But…in the case of my father, he was young, he was male, he was in the Navy, he was receiving a lot of peer pressure to drink, to be one of the guys, so on, so on. Surrounded by nothing for months on end but “the guys”. He was onboard ship with no support system. So maybe…it wasn’t his fault, maybe he didn’t have a strong enough character, maybe he should have…the problem is, it’s such a complex thing, so tied in to societal expectations and norms. You’ll drink with the guys to network, to make friends, to be “a guy”. But if you drink too much, they aren’t there for you, they go off and look for someone more fun. Then you’re on your own.
AA treats it as a simple problem. You’re a drunk? Don’t drink. We’ll hold your hand. So they do give that one thing – a support system – but that isn’t all people need, and may not be helpful at all when loaded with all the other baggage that comes with AA.
Would my dad have started drinking if he wasn’t surrounded by his good old boy network? Maybe not. No one else in his family did. My mother didn’t. None of his children have done more than occasional drinking. He is an outlier in the family. So I suspect at least a part of it is that pressure to take one more drink. Maybe if I’d had that pressure, I couldn’t say no after one glass of wine. I don’t know.
Shackling AA to any coercive agency is just toxic. AA is anarchic, leaderless, and has no mechanism to enforce any orthodoxy. This sounds sort of good, until one thinks about the opportunity for wannabe ‘leaders’ to create their own subcultures under the umbrella of AA. The pipeline of involuntary ‘members’ is a major factor in the growth of AA splinter cults, from Synanon up to the Midtown Group and, just this year, The Syracuse Group.
AA has had an overtly atheist membership since at least 1938. Just as gay people and women have been along for the ride. But the slushy public face of AA, and its paralyzing avoidance of controversy, STILL makes it easy for minorities to be invisible.
Still, critics seem to continue to make the same errors: AA is NOT a ‘treatment’ and the use of paraldehyde (in eh 20s) or benzos (in the 70s) or whatever new detoxing drug is coming up this week is simply a separate issue.
I haven’t had to pretend to believe in god, ‘do’ 12 steps, or struggle against craving alcohol, since 1988.
What do you mean? How is it an error to say that AA doesn’t work but not to say that “AA is NOT a ‘treatment’ and the use of…whatever new detoxing drug is coming up this week is simply a separate issue”? Isn’t the fact that it’s not a treatment the whole point? Isn’t the fact that it’s not a treatment a very good reason for employers not to require it?