Category: Addiction & Clinical Suffering
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The Existential Side of Addiction
by Brenton L. Delp Relief from the Burden of Consciousness There are moments in addiction when the usual explanations seem to recede. No crisis has occurred. No one has argued with the person. There is no obvious trigger in the room. The body is not in acute withdrawal. Work may have gone reasonably well, food…
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Beyond the Twelve Steps: Recovery, Community, and the Future of Peer Support
by Brenton L. Delp Alcoholics Anonymous is one of the most successful voluntary organizations in modern history. Since its founding in 1935, it has helped millions of people achieve and maintain sobriety. Countless lives have been saved through its meetings, its fellowship, and its insistence that one alcoholic can help another where professionals, institutions, and…
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Bloodletting, Psychic Relief, and a Historical Reflection into Symptom Management
by Brenton L. Delp The modern act of cutting is usually approached through the language of pathology, crisis, and psychiatric risk. Those dimensions are real and should never be minimized. Yet history permits another perspective. For much of antiquity and the medieval world, the deliberate release of blood was not regarded as mutilation but as…
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Addiction as Micro-Absolute
by Brenton L. Delp Addiction is usually described as excess, dependency, compulsion, pathology, or maladaptive habit. Each of these descriptions captures something real. Yet none reaches the peculiar dignity the addictive object acquires within the life of the addict. Addiction does not merely bind. It enthrones. The substance, act, or ritual becomes more than a…
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What Is Addiction? A Philosophical Definition
by Brenton L. Delp Addiction is often defined today under the authority of medical science, and not without reason. The medical model did not become dominant by accident. It became dominant because it corrected older brutalities. It helped displace the view that addiction is simply vice, weakness, or bad character. It named dependence, craving, relapse,…
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More About Alcoholism
by Brenton L. Delp Margo’s Got Money Troubles ”There would be no one to perform sanity for.” When Margo’s father says that if he got his own place he would surely relapse, the statement sounds at first like simple fear. But it is more revealing than fear. It is a confession about structure. He is…
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Spirit, Spiritual Malady, and the Logic of Addiction
“There are those who forget that death will come to all. For those who remember, quarrels come to an end.”— The Dhammapada “This essay proceeds from the assumption that addiction is not a personal failure or clinical anomaly, but a historically intelligible response to modern forms of consciousness”. To say this is not to deny…
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Toward a Philosophical Definition of Addiction (Revised)
by Brenton L. Delp Most definitions of addiction begin too late. They begin with what can be seen: repeated use despite consequences, loss of control, craving, withdrawal, tolerance, relapse. These descriptions are not false. They are clinically necessary and often diagnostically precise. They allow institutions to classify, practitioners to intervene, and sufferers to be recognized…
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Consciousness, the DSM, and the Somatic Turn
by Brenton L. Delp The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, published by the American Psychiatric Association in 2013 and later revised as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (2022), represents the most systematic effort of modern psychiatry to classify disturbances of thought, mood, and behavior. Organized into roughly twenty diagnostic…
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From Dionysus to Diagnosis
Substance Use Disorders and the Historical Formation of the Modern Self To ask whether addiction is a timeless human weakness or a uniquely modern crisis is to ask a deeper question: has the structure of the self changed? Alcohol, opium, cannabis, and stimulants are not inventions of the industrial age. Fermentation predates writing. Opium circulated…
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Addiction as Civilizational Self-Medication
Postwar Consciousness, Metaphysical Disillusionment, and the Structure of Modern Suffering The differences between postwar Europe and postwar America are often described in political, economic, or institutional terms. Europe is said to be regulatory, cautious, and bureaucratic; America is described as dynamic, expansionary, and growth-driven. Such descriptions, while empirically accurate, remain superficial if they are not…
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Addiction as Cultural and Psychic Diagnosis
Toward a Treatment Model for Addiction Addiction cannot be treated adequately until it is diagnosed adequately. Contemporary models typically frame addiction as a brain disease, a behavioral disorder, or a moral failure. Each perspective captures a partial truth, yet none explains why addiction has become so pervasive, structurally persistent, and culturally central in modern life.…