Hello members,
As some of you might know, I spent a lot of my board year working on social safety. I had set up a work group, and we fixed a lot of the issues I saw within the association at that time. One thing that I really wanted to approach was awareness around addiction, but unfortunately at the time I did not think I had the resources and time to work on it to a satisfactory degree.
I think a lot of people have a very simplified view of addiction, being ‘If you can stop at any time, you are not addicted’. However, this is a very vague hypothetical, where we often overestimate ourselves (of course I could quit, just not right now). This means that a lot of the time, people find themselves already way further down that path than they thought, without a clear idea of how they got there.
This is why I wanted to share a link to the Jellinek Kliniek ‘Wanneer ben je verslaafd’ (when are you addicted) page. The page is in Dutch, but google translate should fix that right up for you. Unfortunately I could not find a source I trusted to the same degree in English.
If you had the time to read this intro that turned out way longer than I thought, you have the time to read it, and potentially save yourself some trouble later.
https://www.jellinek.nl/vraag-antwoord/wanneer-ben-je-verslaafd-aan-alcohol-of-drugs
Kisses
Freya