Heroin Addiction in the UK

[BristolEcho]

OK, but that's not how it came across. It sounded like a challenging 'Oh really?' as if I'd made up some controversial claim when google is there to tell you and others what so many experts in the field believe.

I thought most people understood addiction as a disease?

Fair enough. I appreciate it appeared flippant, and I did put it without much thought as I was getting ready to eat dinner.

I do recommend reading alternative ideas and also checking out the PDF I recommended earlier by SDF as it covers this specifically though not in much detail.

I can't give your post a more detailed reply as I think I have covid and I'm feeling a bit rough, but will try to at a later time. Nogo has already started to.

Another issue, as I think has been pointed out, is people leaving syringes lying around.

And it's been responded too. Your few posts on this thread have been pretty low effort and mainly seem to want to grind your axe with people that seem to cause disruption in public spaces who also appear to be intoxicated. Do you have anything constructive to post about how we should maybe offer people alternatives, or how to resolve these issues? Or is your next post going to be "oh yeah and some of them piss in bushes too"?

 

[BristolEcho]

I'm not sure how useful this post will be and if it will actually undermine the points that I am trying to make.

However, just imagine if I started a thread about people with psychosis, or trauma and framed it "Schizophrenia - what are we going to do?" And then we all started posting about random negative experiences that we'd had with people that we precived as having Schizophrenia (a diagnosis they use less now ftr), and parroted many of the negative and damaging stereotypes that people have of the conditions because of the actions of a minority of people who may or may not have that diagnosis. Then we also pushed medical model ways of thinking that are dated in their nature. Would we think that this was okay?

Cause again I have seen the damage that the stigma of people who have been given that diagnosis. How the press and media have perpetuated it in how they report on it, and portray it in films and books. Even in workplaces that claim to be trauma informed I still come across damaging ways of working like linking psychosis directly to violence in risk assessments and put it under risk to others, which completely ignores that the majority of people who have experienced psychosis are actually at higher risk from others, or to themselves, than they are towards others when unwell. How that then reinfocied the stigma in workers that held that belief already, or didn't know any different themselves.

This is also the same for homeless people who are way more likely to be assaulted than they are to ever assault people ime. DP Hunters book covers this really well and I think I remember him saying either in the book, or in a podcast how most people have a private space where they can go and have their mental health crisis, unfortunately that is not afforded to people who don't have access to housing so it plays out in the streets. And I've seen that then recorded and posted online. Gross eh?

Because honestly for a website where we often speak about class solidarity this thread is frankly fucking shit.

And FTR I agree with Campulna that substance use covers pretty much everyone.