Why Do We Need to Escape?

by Irene Daniel

I recently viewed a 60 Minutes episode, Heartbreak in the Heartland, regarding the epidemic of heroin addiction in the Buckeye State of Ohio. I was reminded of a Lisa Ling piece, Inside Utah's Struggle with Drug Addiction, aired last October on CNN, which told a similar story in conservative Mormon, middle-class households in Utah.

What should be clear to everyone by now, is that no one is immune from addiction. Every day in the United States of America, 44 people die of a drug overdose. Every single day.

The good news is that issues of mental illness and addiction are finally being discussed without labeling every addict as a low-life, evoking compassion even from conservative Republicans like Chris Christie. I applaud Governor Christie for sharing a very personal and relevant story about losing a beloved friend to addiction, and expressing a commitment to helping addicts rather than stigmatizing and jailing them. Bravo Governor!

While all mentally ill people are not addicts and all addicts are not mentally ill, both maladies originate in our brains and how our brain chemistry affects our perspectives of life. We are beginning to understand that a defect in brain chemistry is not the same thing as a defect in character. And while our brain activity affects our choices, and those choices may reflect upon our character, the fact remains that the origin of those bad choices is a defective brain chemistry.

Having lived with the effects of both mental illness and addiction in my family, I come away with an appreciation of how these afflictions can intersect and collide with one another; creating nothing but chaos. And the underlying foundation for all addictions is the need to escape. I know this was true for me. I have spent most of my life running away from myself and my past, and am happy to no longer have the need to escape life in my own skin and in my own head. It took awhile.

And so, the question: Why do we need to escape? From what great horror must we distance ourselves? What monsters and demons chase us to a place where we do damage to ourselves in our escape hatches constructed from our own silent desperation?

I know what I was escaping. And I know now that what was scaring me wasn't actually real. I self-medicated for years in an attempt to tame the demons of depression, until I crashed and burned. It was only in the void of the aftermath that I could find my own truth; the void of broken dreams and empty promises. And it was in the capacity to replace that void with better choices and sober company that I have been enabled to surrender my need to escape from the pain of life.

And that's where our American addiction epidemic starts -- with the need to escape pain; physical pain with prescription drugs. Prescription pain killers seem to be the Alpha and Omega in many an addict's story. It might commence with taking Vicadin or Oxy for post-surgical pain. And it too often ends with an overdose of either prescription meds or heroin, or both; and often includes alcohol.

So, back to the initial question. Why do we need to escape? What is so monstrously overwhelming about life that so many of us just can't handle it without a little help from our local apothecary of either legal or street drugs?

Medicating appropriately for pain is different than self-medicating to escape, and it is necessary to draw this distinction. Many of us need medication to live, and should take appropriate pain meds and/or psychotropic drugs under the proper supervision. Emotional balance can lead to emotional enlightenment, and help us to see our own light and stay focused upon our own tasks and and our own path.

Self-medicating to escape, however, can only lead to darkness and death; whether instantly or by a thousand cuts.

And so, I can only wonder -- what is making my fellow Americans so unhappy that the need to escape into very dangerous drugs has become so prevalent?


                                                                  Copyright 2015, Irene Daniel, all rights reserved.