Tag: ADDICTION

Addiction and the University by Wendy Dossett

ADMIN

TW: Sexual assault, suicide (ideation and attempt), addiction, alcohol and other drugs.  

In my final undergraduate year, an acquaintance who was seeking support for addiction issues told me she’d been advised by a recovery mentor to ditch her ambitions and not apply to go to university. ‘First things first,’ she had said. ‘My recovery is more important.’

I was stunned.

At that point in my life, more than three decades ago now, my own addiction problems were beginning to take hold. However, it would be more than ten years before I would acknowledge that. I had, at that time, little understanding of addiction, and no understanding at all of recovery. I considered the advice my friend had received to be utterly outrageous. Surely, a university education should be available to anyone in possession of the admission requirements! I objected, viscerally, to this person being figured as ‘too fragile’ for education. I considered the aspiration for education to be, not only a good, but a right. My own university education meant the absolute world to me. How dare some ‘non-university-educated’ person, (I assumed, on no basis at whatsoever), limit my friend’s reasonable ambition!

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Down The Rabbit Hole: My Journey with Anxiety, Alcohol and Benzodiazepine Use by Anon

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“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

In this blog, I want to share my experience using various drugs, namely alcohol and different prescription medications, throughout my academic career. I also want to acknowledge that people use drugs—both legal and illegal—for many different reasons, often at the same time. Sometimes they just want to enjoy themselves. Sometimes they want to relax. Sometimes they do those around them are engaging in drug use. And sometimes, drugs are used as a coping mechanism in the context of mental illness, which is my experience. Looking back, I believe that my substance use was appropriate during some periods, and clearly problematic during others. I believe that problematic substance use is a hidden and largely taboo topic in academia, and that we need to acknowledge that it exists.

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