As the author of Lust, Men and Meth: A Gay Man’s Guide to Sex and Recovery, David Fawcett, Ph.D., L.C.S.W., has been speaking in cities across the United States, meeting many people affected by their own or other’s meth use. He is also a person with HIV, therapist and clinical hypnotherapist in private practice in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, who serves as the mental health and HIV expert for TheBody.com’s “Ask the Experts” forum.
In Part 2 of our interview with Fawcett, we discussed how family members, hookup app users and other community members can counter the stigma that can exacerbate meth use, as well as possible next steps to harness the growing awareness of both meth use and stigma.(You can find part 1 of the interview here.)
Many friends, loved ones, care providers and community members are involved with people seeking to make changes in their meth use. What are common pitfalls that people may not even know they’re doing, in terms of using stigmatizing language or a stigmatizing framework? How can family members and allies be supportive and also take care of themselves – do what they need to do without compounding the stigma?
It’s a great question. It’s complicated.
One of the ways that people cope with addiction is to use a morbid humor about it and their behavior and some of the things they’ve done – almost joking about it – and having kind of a group identity based on those behaviors. One of the appeals of meth particularly is the taboo quality of it. It’s actually taking that stigmatized aspect and embracing it in an unhealthy way.
That can sustain a level of stigma, just because they’ve incorporated that into their identity somehow in ways that they’re not even conscious of; people can do it automatically. So pointing that out to them, pointing out the language, pointing out how to be conscious of words and correcting them and [encouraging them to be] in environments that are corrective is really important.
Often people continue to employ the defense of stigmatizing others as they’re coming through their healing process. So we’ll see a lot of stigma within the addiction community. As I mentioned [in Part 1 of the interview], alcohol users stigmatize meth. But even within the meth community, people who’ve smoked it look down on people that snorted, and people who’ve snorted look down on people who’ve injected: [There are] hierarchies of stigma that can persist if they’re not challenged or at least corrected. So just raising awareness of this is important.
Every moment counts; let's capture them.