In an illuminating New York Times profile, Arianna Huffington exposes the inadequate way the current recovery movement talks about recovery. My hope is that her thinking informs other places in the field.

Her quotes:

“We talked about what the problem was — it was not drugs, it was chemical imbalance. We didn’t talk about the disease; we talked about a psychological imbalance.”

“You can imagine the shame of trying to figure out how your body works to do cocaine, meth, speed — you can’t even mention it in the same sentence as cocaine.”

The “cycle of addiction” makes the disease sound like an all-encompassing process:

“Once you start this trajectory of chemically developing a disease, and you get into using things,” she says, “your body will turn to crap, and you won’t be able to survive, and you will get into chemical dependence or want to drop out of school. It’s this downward spiral. That doesn’t mean the disease is something that just happened. That means, somehow, you messed up your biology.”

Much more can be read at the post. To get the full story, read it on The New York Times.