eNewsletter
June 14, 2010
America Honors Recovery awards announced; Rally for Recovery!; resources, Learn more...
Recovery Advocacy Toolkit: Making Our Voices Count
includes media outreach templates, event organizing “how-to” materials and many other resources. Learn more…
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eNewsletter - January 29, 2010
Words Matter
New research has confirmed what Faces & Voices has been working to change – the language that we use to talk about people with addiction and/or people in recovery and their family members. It makes a difference, even for health care professionals working in addiction treatment. “We found that referring to an individual with ‘abuser’ terminology evokes more punitive attitudes than does describing that person’s situation in exactly the same words except for using ‘disorder’ terminology,” says John F. Kelly, PhD, Associate Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Addiction Medicine, who led the study. “Reducing the use of such stigmatizing terms could help diminish the shame, guilt and embarrassment that act as barriers, keeping people from seeking help. The authors noted that e ven though the World Health Organization acknowledged ‘abuser’ as a stigmatizing term 30 years ago, it remains in common usage. The complete study is available here.
Kelly notes that terms like ‘abuser’ are not used in other clinical areas – individuals with eating-related problems are almost universally referred to as having an ‘eating disorder’ and not as ‘food abusers.’, he says.While national and international health agencies have advocated eliminating “substance abuser,” the term remains in common use, even in literature from federal agencies.
“There’s an old proverb that states if you want something to survive and flourish, call it a flower; if you want to kill it, call it a weed,” he adds. “Saying that someone has a substance use disorder conveys the notion that they are suffering from something that may be treatable, which of course is true. Anything we can do to eradicate or minimize stigma-related obstacles to treatment will help reduce the prodigious social impact these disorders have on individuals and society, and changing the way we refer to affected individuals is one simple and achievable step towards that goal.”