Key points
- People who struggle with addiction are often not regarded as reliable reporters on their own experiences.
- Questions about addicts’ abilities to be honest create a dangerous set of twinned stereotypes.
- People in recovery may never be taken or respected as experts on their own recovery.
Can someone who has struggled with addiction be an expert on their own addiction and recovery? This may seem a puzzling question, but it is one that is emerging in the context of Brad Pitt’s announcement that he has decided to drink in a moderate or restrained way after seven years of being sober. His sobriety was in the context of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), which makes it fair to assume that for him during that time, he abstained from alcohol.
Pitt’s decision is being second-guessed by many in different corners of the recovery world, most especially in Alcoholics Anonymous. Consider what Joe Schrank, a clinical social worker and person in recovery, offered in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter:
When he said he’s drinking moderately after seven years of abstinence, there’s a bunch of different things going on there. Typically speaking, alcoholics are just a horrible source of information about themselves. Matthew Perry walked around reeking like booze telling people he was sober.
The invocation of Matthew Perry to make his point is powerful; Matthew Perry died of an accidental ketamine overdose. Was Perry’s walking around telling people he was sober when he was reeking of alcohol evidence of his unreliability in self-reporting, or was it evidence that he was a liar?
Schrank conflates unreliability with lying, which happens quite frequently when it comes to people struggling with addiction. In Schrank’s view, it seems as if Perry’s lack of self-knowledge drove his lies. Or put slightly more charitably, Matthew Perry was so self-deceived that he couldn’t do anything but lie to himself and to others. By extension, Pitt may be doing the same thing.
What’s self-knowledge?
What does it mean to be a reliable source of information about yourself? This is the question of self-knowledge, which is one of the oldest questions in philosophy. One of the inscriptions at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi is “Know Thyself.” This is an exhortation or an appeal for each person to undertake the lifelong process of coming to know who they are.
While many philosophers took introspection to be the method of self-knowledge, others counseled looking both inwards and outwards. We humans are always works in progress who live within multiple social relations, act on commitments and projects, and navigate the hurly-burly of life. It is true that each of us can have some access to our own thoughts that others cannot (imagine those times you kept a straight face while laughing heartily on the inside), but this really isn’t evidence for the self-knowledge at issue.
Much of our knowledge of ourselves comes from what we share with each other. We share experiences and come to know ourselves through them and in the company of others. I know myself because of how others experience and know me. Self-knowledge is relational and dynamic because that is what we humans are.
What is reliability?
Reliability is not just a trait or quality of a person; it is relational, though that is often ignored. If a person is an accurate and honest reporter of their self-knowledge but no one treats them as such, are they reliable? They are afforded no credibility. There’s a sticky wicket. To a significant degree, to be reliable and credible is to be treated as reliable and credible. At minimum, it is to have your claims and decisions taken seriously and not rejected out of hand.
Having decisions mocked or second-guessed because a person struggled with an addiction is par for the course. That is both unfair and harmful; it may be doubly so when other members of recovery communities and addiction and treatment professionals deploy those very stereotypes about unreliability and lying. Every time those stereotypes are deployed, they widen the credibility gap.
But what if someone is in AA?
Schrank does recognize that what Pitt is doing may be possible. He acknowledges:
The World Health Organization says that this is possible—that with moderate drinking, even after long periods of abstinence, there are lots of people who find success of clinical significance and life improvement. The AA morality police take this stuff as red meat for their need to finger wag and shame. Not everybody needs to spend the rest of their life totally abstinent with a cup of sh*tty coffee in a Styrofoam cup regurgitating platitudes. Some do—I’m one of those people.
Schrank appears to be distancing himself from others in AA but does so in a way that heralds his self-knowledge and knowledge acquired through years of working with people struggling with addiction. But why should we take him to be a reliable reporter on what he claims to know? This is not just some dodgy philosophical move: If he calls the knowledge-based authority of addicts in general into question, he doesn’t get to play the role of expert on his own or anyone else’s experiences.
This is a very undesirable conclusion. The way to avoid it is for all of us—people in recovery, treatment professionals, and others who love, live, and work with us—to stop trafficking in these dangerous stereotypes.
I am genuinely glad that Schrank knows what he needs, and I believe him. I choose to extend the same benefit to Brad Pitt.