Pubdate: Thu, 15 Aug 2013
Source: Georgia Straight, The (CN BC)
Copyright: 2013 The Georgia Straight
Contact:  http://www.straight.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1084
Author: Gabor Mate

CORY MONTEITH DEATH REFLECTS MEDIA'S LACK OF CURIOSITY ABOUT CAUSES OF
ADDICTION

IT IS ALWAYS big news when a celebrity is stricken dead by a substance
overdose. What never makes the news is why such tragedies happen.

The roster of drug- and alcohol-related show-business deaths is ever
expanding: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Keith Moon, Kurt
Cobain; in the recent past, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, Amy
Winehouse, Whitney Houston; and, most recently of all, Cory Monteith.
A complete list would, of course, include many others.

The popular media gathers around the famous dead like vultures around
a cadaver, picking their stories clean to feed the public appetite for
intimate and irrelevant details. What friends did Cory spend the
evening before his demise? How does his girlfriend feel back on the
set of Glee, the TV program where Monteith found stardom?

My daughter works part-time as a hostess at a bar in Vancouver's
Gastown area. One night, shortly after Monteith's death, two British
journalists showed up.

"We drove up from LA," they said. "We have heard Cory had some drinks
somewhere in this neighbourhood the night he died. We are tracing his
last steps. Did he come in here by any chance?"

Clearly, for readers in Britain it was of pivotal importance that
these intrepid scribes identify the exact watering hole where the
actor may have had his last drinks. They had driven more than 2,000
kilometres to find out.

In our celebrity culture only the demise of a famous person attracts
press attention to what is a daily human tragedy across North America
and the world. Many other human beings succumb to drugs, an entirely
preventable carnage that almost completely eludes public notice. Car
crashes, murders, accidental deaths from other causes are the fodder
for excited headlines. The death of the drug afflicted passes under
the radar.

If a celebrity suffers, the media deems it essential information. When
a famous unfortunate, say, Charlie Sheen, publicly displays his
bipolar illness and self-medication with alcohol with a nubile woman
on each arm, that rivets media notice. If a star dies, that is
front-page material until the next celebrity gives birth or sleeps
with someone. But even with all this obsessive focus on one person's
decease from drugs, the question of why this happened (much less why
it happens to people in general) is seemingly of little interest.

Striking about the coverage of the Monteith saga was the lack of
investigation into what it may have been about life that made this
talented young man seek refuge in drug use. There was virtually no
discussion of why a number of treatments and interventions, since his
teenage years, had failed to divert him from his fatal course.

I was encouraged, therefore, when a reporter for People magazine
contacted me for an interview. "Hi Dr Mate. I'm a staff writer at
People. We are writing, in the wake of Monteith's death, about the
struggles of addicts, the problems of heroin addiction, and the easy
availability of heroin in Vancouver. Seems you would be uniquely
qualified to talk as an expert, so I'm hoping we can connect=C2=85"

I had no high expectations, given People's dedication to
superficiality and its adoration of the short attention span. Still, I
did welcome this opportunity to inject at least a tincture of science
and experience into the public discourse. Even at my age, sometimes my
own naivete amazes me.

It did not matter that the reporter seemed not to have researched my
very publicly expressed views, having happened upon my name through a
contact in Los Angeles. Here was my opportunity to explain my
perspective: Addiction is not the fundamental problem, but the
addict's desperate and doomed attempt to solve a problem-that of
unbearable emotional pain, self-loathing, and emptiness.

Trauma and childhood emotional loss are the template for addictions.
They instill the pain, engender the self-loathing, and create the
emptiness. Crucially, they program the very chemistry and physiology
of the brain to make the cerebral circuits more receptive to the
soothing or exciting effects of substances. Interventions, treatment
programs, laws, social opprobrium do not work-often make the addiction
more tenacious, in fact-because they do not address causes, only
behaviours. Behaviours are effects and you don't solve a problem by
tampering with effects.

Monteith's life was a case in point. His parents had divorced when he
was seven, after who knows how many years of rancor and stress. He had
learning difficulties and, quite likely, ADHD. In the most incisive,
and perhaps only in-depth analysis of his history, the wonderful
journalist Maia Szalavitz described the appalling treatments he had
been subjected to:

"Monteith's history with ineffective and harmful anti-drug programs
started almost as soon as he began using, at 13. Between that age and
16, he attended some 12 different schools, including several aimed at
'troubled teens,' a phrase that has become shorthand for harsh
programs that we now know can backfire.

"During the years when he was locked inside troubled teen
programs-1995-1998-tough love reined. Tactics were aimed at 'breaking'
youth through physical and emotional abuse-everything from solitary
confinement, punitive restraint and sleep and food deprivation to
public humiliation like wearing signs saying, 'I am an asshole,' being
made to dress in drag and being forced to scrub bathrooms with the
same toothbrush you must later use to brush your teeth."

Monteith experienced the physiological and psychological consequences
of early childhood in a dysfunctional home. Effectively bereft of
nurturing adult contact, from adolescence, he was traumatized by a
system ostensibly designed to help him. It is a near certainty that
none of the treatment programs he later attended ever helped him to
understand and overcome the impact of trauma: most treatment programs
ignore trauma.

The issue, I pointed out, was not "the easy availability of heroin in
Vancouver". A recent New York Times article lamented the growing
problem of heroin in New England where, in New Hampshire for example,
40 people died of overdoses in 2012. And heroin is certainly available
in LA, where Cory lived and publicly suffered from his opiate
addiction. The issue was the terrible misunderstanding, at all levels
of our society, of why people become addicted and how they can be helped.

The People reporter seemed genuinely interested in all this material,
asked intelligent questions, and expressed appreciation. We spoke for
well over half an hour.

The article never appeared, and I didn't hear from the journalist
until I wrote to ask. "The editors were planning a sidebar story on
abuse issues with expert commentary, but they scrapped that plan later
in the game when space got cut. Sorry about that."

I understood perfectly. In Britain Kate Middleton gave birth and in
Hollywood someone was probably sleeping with someone. How would a
discussion of the causes of addiction and of the failure of our
current system to understand it compare with matters of such urgent
import?

Can we hope that perhaps the next celebrity casualty will ignite the
needed discussion around addiction? Unlikely. What is certain is that
in the meantime many other humans, unworthy of notice in the media
mindset, will be buried daily-victims of drugs and, even more so,
victims of ignorance.

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Vancouver physician Gabor Mate is the author of four books, including In 

the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, which won
the Hubert Events Non-Fiction Prize in the 2009 B.C. Book Prizes. For
more on this book, go here. This article originally appeared on his new
website.
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MAP posted-by: Matt