{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} :: The Tip of the Big Mother Iceberg

There could not be a more confused, incoherent, counterproductive, unethical, unscientific, and harmful approach to addiction recovery than the disease/treatment/recovery-group concept of addiction that prevails in our social service system.

The widespread practice of professionals forcing or intimidating clients into addiction treatment services is an unsurpassed ethical catastrophe, one made more ugly by the fact that so many who make use of their professional selves to fill the ranks of AA are AA members themselves.

Because of professionals, the public believes that addiction is a treatable disease epidemic, and will consequently tolerate endless expansion of the addiction treatment industry, and the increasing, systematic violation of addicted people's civil rights. In this, we have betrayed the public. If you tell your clients that addiction is or is caused by a disease, you are lying to them because you know full well there is no evidence to support that contention.

There is no way that the professions can be forgiven for their intolerable conduct during these frenzied years of freewheeling addiction treatment funding. The burden of guilt for the public health cataclysm of addiction treatment will remain a permanent, dark stain on all of the health professions.

If you are a licensed professional engaged in addiction treatment or counseling, I advise you here to get out of the business. It is a matter of your personal honor and professional stance. Substance abuse counseling is a bogus occupation, newly created around 1980 to accommodate rivers of federal cash. If you are a certified substance abuse counselor, find new work in an occupation for which you are qualified. Your certification is worthless, a kite flown on the winds of discontent, misguided trust, missionary zeal, and unwise legislation.

There is no help for addicted people, and as a professional you ought to know this. Addicted people will have to quit drinking and using, not a great accomplishment for any of them, but your "help" is only a distraction from, and often an obstacle to, their very serious task.

I will take the professions, and perhaps you, to task for the grievous error of offering services called addiction treatment, and for the unforgivable error of referring individuals into the social cult, Alcoholics Anonymous.

Also, for those counsellors who prescribe "Smart Recovery" to supplement AA 12 Step Groups, I'm not going for that shiitt either:

SMART Recovery is a spin-off of Rational Recovery consisting of professionals who believe that addiction is a psychological problem or has psychological origins. They waste peoples' time disputing irrational ideas and getting people to attend their recovery group meetings. SMART uses my literary albatross, The Small Book, and they refuse to recommend the later, and far better book, Rational Recovery: The New Cure for Substance Addiction, which takes the reader directly to complete recovery within the time it takes to read the book. The reason they won't recommend the better book, is that it eliminates the need to attend SMART meetings and makes fun of REBT pop-psychology. Stop wasting your time with recovery groups.

Therapy Culture, actually, was the title of a book by the University of Kent sociology professor Frank Furedi, who personifies the older, more distinctively British version of anti-self-help. We're turning into a nation of feebletons, Furedi argued, what with our post-Diana compulsion to wallow in our emotions. A certain variety of socialist has never had any truck with the idea of self-improvement, and Furedi, who once chaired the Revolutionary Communist party, took this argument to its logical conclusion - that it's almost always wrong to seek help from popular psychology, because it's like religion was for Marx: it anaesthetises the workers, holding them back from overthrowing the state.

According to the American version of anti-self-help, recently put forward by the author Steve Salerno, the problem is the exact opposite: it's not that we are feeble, but that we're encouraged to imagine ourselves invincible, capable of limitless achievements - and so we're doomed to crushing disappointment. "Does it not make sense that a society in which everyone seeks personal fulfilment might have a hard time holding together? That such a society would lose its sense of community and collective purpose?" Salerno asks in his book Sham: How The Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless. His argument is far more serious than Furedi's, and it's been much in evidence recently in the response to The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne, currently Britain's bestselling mind/body/spirit book, which advocates solving your depression, anxiety or lack of fulfilment by thinking really hard about owning cool stuff.

Anyone who mocks The Secret is fine by me.