Reducing stigma around addiction and Substance Use Disorder (SUD) is crucial to help individuals feel comfortable seeking the treatment that they need and deserve. With everyone talking about the opioid health crisis, now is an important time to start an open and honest conversation about addiction and SUD.
Leah Scott, Olivia Turner, Sydney Hart, and I are working in conjunction with the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction to do just that. We started the “Stigma Ends at CU” campaign to use the information we have learned in class to start a conversation and use evidence to get the message across.
We are translating our knowledge so people have the facts and not just opinions. Stigma Ends at CU is about putting faces to the individuals with lived or ongoing experience with SUD, and the campaign serves to show that it affects many of us, not just a certain demographic.
We are doing this by posting pictures on our social media accounts of people and their lived experiences. It has been very moving to see the amount of people willing to share their stories with us and the community. This is my favourite part of our campaign. It shows that not one person and story is the same, and that this issue really affects people differently. We have heard a lot of stories in which the person recovers and has an amazing life. But, unfortunately, we have also heard heart-wrenching stories where some people didn’t get to this point.
Going into this campaign, I knew it was going to be a heavy topic, but I didn’t realize to what extent this would be the case. It has really opened my eyes and shown me a world I had not previously given enough thought to.
That is why it is so important to see the person and not the addiction. By using words such as “addict” or “junkie,” you are defining the person by their SUD, and making it easier to say things such as “they did this to themselves—why do they deserve treatment?” In reality, it isn’t a choice to have SUD. Our campaign promotes using person-centered language, such as “a person living with Substance Use Disorder,” because it is a disorder. It is not who they are.
By using this kind of person-centered language instead, it also helps you realize that people who experience SUD deserve treatment, just like someone with diabetes or cancer deserves treatment. It also opens you up to the world I now see: a world without judgment when someone admits they need help.
With the growing talk about ending stigma around mental health, people are forgetting about SUD because it is very heavily stigmatized on its own. This is why it is so important to have advocacy—such as this campaign—to bring awareness to the topic, so it doesn’t get left behind when talking about mental health as a whole.
The awareness being brought to mental health is doing amazing things. It is allowing people to get help and not be afraid of being judged or questioned about their abilities to perform at work or school. Discussion of SUD and addiction needs to be a part of that.