A bill in Congress – sponsored by Joe Biden – is attempting to change the National Institute on Drug Abuse to something kinder and gentler: the National Institute on Diseases of Addiction. Two therapists – a psychologist and a psychiatrist – say they don’t like the focus moving from “abuse” to “disease”:

We have chafed at the “brain disease” rhetoric since it was first promulgated by NIDA in 1995. Granted, the rationale behind it is well-intentioned. Nevertheless, we believe that the brain disease concept is bad for the public’s mental health literacy.

Characterizing addiction as a brain disease misappropriates language more properly used to describe conditions such as multiple sclerosis or schizophrenia—afflictions that are neither brought on by sufferers themselves nor modifiable by their desire to be well. Also, the brain disease rhetoric is fatalistic, implying that users can never fully free themselves of their drug or alcohol problems. Finally, and most important, it threatens to obscure the vast role personal agency plays in perpetuating the cycle of use and relapse to drugs and alcohol.

This is not in some nutball Christian magazine, either. It’s in Slate. Read the rest here.