Addiction insights Articles

Can addiction reach a point where personal choice disappears?

It can feel that way — but that doesn’t mean choice is truly absent.

What’s often lost is not choice itself, but the perceived availability or viability of alternatives.

Alcohol addiction is often described as a chronic brain disease — a medical condition over which the individual has little or no control.

This view has dominated the mainstream narrative for decades.

But what if this model is incomplete, and in many cases, unhelpful?

The idea of ‘choice’ is very interesting and revealing particularly when it comes to mental health problems and especially when it comes to the central idea of whether or not a person actually does, or doesn’t, have a choice about the way that they think, feel or behave.