During the many years I spent working in the addiction and mental health field, first as a neuroscientist and later (2000-2008) in the UK helping empower people to facilitate their recovery (healing), I rarely heard the word ‘trauma’ being used.
Few practitioners I met mentioned that the person with the substance use problem might be self-medicating to ameliorate psychological pain. And yet in society, there were plenty of people visiting their doctor and obtaining a prescription of benzodiazepines such as librium, which are highly addictive substances, or antidepressants, which also produce problems, to help them deal with unpleasant psychological states of anxiety or depression.
When I sat down and talked to people who were on their journey to recovery from substance use problems, they would sometimes mention problems in their life that pre-dated their excessive use of substances and often were the reason they started to use the substance in question. This was particularly the case with former heroin users.
