As a local addiction specialist with an office in Beverly Hills, I'm afforded a ringside seat to the sideshow of Lindsay's ups and downs. Viewing at such close proximity, it enables me to observe the invisible forces at play that are contributing to Lindsay's unnecessary demise.
As one of my clients from Canada stated in last week's alcohol moderation group, “Here in Hollywood it is expected that if you are having a problem with alcohol, you must be an alcoholic and must abstain completely, attend AA groups and adopt the 12-step philosophy." He went on to say that if he runs into someone he met through AA, who says he no longer attends AA meetings, he assumes that person must be drinking heavily again and that his brain disease has won the battle over his recovery. His AA friend would never consider that he is doing better, has found an alternative solution and no longer needs traditional daily support.
In my own life, I can tell you that I once had to go for radiation treatment five times a week. Now I go about one or two times a year because I am doing better, not worse.
The drama of Lindsay's life and court case that has drawn us to the TV and the web is as much a made-up fantasy as any movie I have ever seen. As one addiction usually feeds another, Lindsay's addictive behavior is feeding the public's voracious, out-of-control hunger to see a young, gifted and obviously troubled woman self-destruct. Hollywood's addiction for this type of news is akin to a crowd of people urging a poor soul standing at the ledge of a building to jump.
Hardly the support that Lindsay needs to overcome her demons and get well.
What is Hollywood's and the court system's real agenda, and how is it playing out?
In Lindsay's case, and in the case of many addicts, there are assumptions and scientifically unsupported concepts that are being drawn upon as if they were truths. Unfortunately, the success stories in treating addiction are few and far between.
The modality that is supported by the court is to remand the addict into a 12-step program. That's it. No other treatment regime is ever considered, and because of that, many addicts are
already doomed to failure before the judge's gavel punctuates the court's decision.
As you'll read, this is tantamount to sentencing a cancer patient to Laetrile treatment.
There are many misconceptions on addiction treatment, and many of them stem from what we think we know about the cause of addiction, and lifestyle's impact on the disease.
Alcoholic's Anonymous has treated millions of people. However, according to "The Handbook of Alcoholism Treatment Approaches: Effective Alternatives (3rd ed.)," edited by R.K. Hester and W.R. Miller, AA ranks 38th in effectiveness.
Further, as shown by a study by R.G. Smart (AA does not release statistical results because of the anonymous nature of its work), the success rate is about 5%. That's no better than spontaneous remission (getting better without treatment).
Regardless of the number of people who relapse and return to AA, the statistics for AA's success still hover around the 5% mark.
While there are 37 research-based methods that are more effective than AA, the two questions then become: What is the chance for Lindsay to fail using traditional AA treatments and why are we only offering her a recovery method that she has failed at several times before?
Does this sound like the familiar pop definition of insanity (doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result)?
One of the challenges in impressing the need for 12-step based treatment to an addict is to have them recognize their higher power in a secular society, and to claim powerlessness over their own decisions.
In more cases than you might realize, the reason people become addicts is poor coping methods. Without getting into arenas like "addiction substitution" (trading one addiction for another – like drugs for religion), the very nature of addiction is a complex result of
biological propensity, childhood experience, peer-pressure, and wrong naive choices.
We have been told that the surest way to get an addict into treatment is to wait until they hit bottom. Hollywood feels that it has the right to force Lindsay to bottom out because Hollywood and the courts know what is in her best interests.
The court's earnest but seemingly monotheistic AA approach to addiction is forcing Lindsay into a darkened bleacher at an AA meeting, even when it is obvious that traditional treatment is not going to work. Not for the vast majority of addicts, and certainly not for this troubled young woman.