Stigmatisation: classifying drug and alcohol misuse as mental illness

Crisp et al's (2000) article aims “to determine opinions of the British adult population concerning those with mental illnesses as baseline data for a campaign to combat stigmatisation”. Specifically, the authors go on to list the disorders investigated: severe depression, panic attacks, schizophrenia, dementia, eating disorders, alcoholism and drug addiction.

I was surprised by the way in which alcoholism and drug addiction were grouped under the label of mental illness as if this was a commonly accepted truth within the scientific community.

The literature on drug and alcohol use and addiction suggests that these phenomena have to be seen as a complex interaction between a variety of factors, including psychosocial ones (McMurran, 1994). Similarly, views on drug use (and also mental illness) may change over time and are also the result of socio-political and historical contexts (Foucault, 1967; Levine, 1979). Treating drug and alcohol addiction as mental illness is an indication of the way mental illnesses are currently defined by the American Psychiatric Association (Cooksey & Brown, 1998) and should perhaps not be accepted all too readily as truth.

I recognise the psychiatric community's need to categorise mental illnesses. However, by classifying drug and alcohol users as suffering from mental illness, a position for which no evidence is given, this research, however well intended, may be stigmatising in itself.