By Justin Caouette
AJOB Neuroscience
Volume 4, Issue 3, 2013
Addressing concerns about framing addiction as disease, authors (Hammer et. al 2013) argue that we should refrain from doing so as such a categorization may unfairly stigmatize the addict. They suggest that an analysis of disease metaphors bolsters their view, and the utility that could be had by labeling addiction as disease is outweighed by the potential disutility in doing so. Tolend support to their view they appeal to intuitions about the common folk‟s analysis of diseased individuals. Their claim is that a common understanding of disease unfairly depicts addicts as “wretches” or “sinners”. They use this as evidence in favor of rejecting the addiction -as-disease model. We argue that the author‟s metaphoric framing of how common folks often view diseased individuals is misguided for a number of reasons. We focus on three points of contention.
The entire piece is here.
