Stories We Tell about Addiction
Arleen Tuchman is a 2022-2023 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “Mending and Transforming.”
The stories we tell matter. They can do harm, as do the stories we tell about addiction in the United States today. They create borders, separating people with addictions and their families from their communities. The result is that people struggling with addiction – and the loved ones who try to help them – often suffer from feelings of estrangement. Rather than reach out for help, they isolate, hiding their pain, feelings of shame, and suffering from friends, extended family, and the wider community. This is how addiction wreaks havoc not only on the lives of those who struggle with addiction, but also on the lives of those around them. And since addiction often runs in families, pain and suffering is often transmitted from generation to generation, entrenching feelings of inevitability and destroying any sense of hope.
I decided to begin in the early 19th century, in part because of the richness of the letters John and Abigail Adams wrote as they tried to make sense of the excessive drinking and untimely death of their son, Charles, at the age of 30.
My current book project is an historical exploration of how families and friends have explained, reacted to, coped with, and experienced the drinking and drugging of their loved ones. My focus is on the United States. I decided to begin in the early 19th century, in part because of the richness of the letters John and Abigail Adams wrote as they tried to make sense of the excessive drinking and untimely death of their son, Charles, at the age of 30. Nor was he the only family member who drank excessively. Abigail’s brother and several of their grandchildren also struggled with “intemperance.” In examining letters, memoirs, medical writings, and fictional accounts over the past 200 years, I’m seeking to understand how families and friends framed their relationship with their loved ones. Did they see themselves as victims? Did they express responsibility for the addict’s behavior or for their recovery? Did they see the behavior as a medical problem? A moral failure? Where and to whom did they turn for help? How did they find the strength to persevere? What might have given them hope?
As part of this project, I am also interested in why and how the idea of addiction as a family disease first took root. What I’ve found so far suggests that the idea was first clearly articulated in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), published in 1944, although it was up to the Al-Anon Family Groups, founded in 1951, to turn the focus from the alcoholic to the friends and families of those who struggled with addiction and alcoholism. It took several more decades before treatment centers began to think of family members as needing therapy in their own right (rather than including them in programming so they could better understand their loved ones’ problems). I am currently looking into when Cumberland Heights, a treatment center which opened in 1966 just outside of Nashville, TN, established its family program. My specific goal for this year’s Fellows Program is to write an article that explores why treatment centers established family programs in the first place, what they did during these sessions, and what visions of mending and healing they tried to impart to the participants.
The study of stories – of the ways we create meaning – rests at the heart of what humanists do. In my current project, I am searching for signs of how people in the past perceived their situation, gave meaning to their predicaments, and envisioned paths to healing. Studying the past can uncover the roots of many of the attitudes – harmful and helpful – that we hold today. It also has the potential to inspire new ways of moving forward by bringing to light approaches to healing and caring that may no longer be evident to us today.
Arleen Tuchman is the Nelson O. Tyrone Jr. Chair in History at Vanderbilt University and an historian of medicine. Her research interests include the cultural history of health, disease, and addiction in the United States and Europe. Her most recent book, Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease (Yale University Press, 2020), won the 2022 George Rosen Prize in the history of public health from the American Association for the History of Medicine and the 2021 PROSE Book Award in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from the Association of American Publishers. She is currently working on a history of addiction and the family in the United States. You can follow her on Twitter @TuchmanA.