Journal o f Social Distress and the Homeless, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1993

B o o k Review

The Demonization of Everyday Life Gregory Bovasso 1

The Diseasing of America. By Stanton Peele. The thesis of Stanton Peele's Diseasing of America: Addiction Treatment Out of Control is that the drug treatment industry is perpetuating an ideology of powerlessness. This ideology is stimulated and facilitated by various social stressors, such as those associated with lower social class status. Peele uses drug abuse as a departure point for examining other forms of social distress (e.g., child abuse) which are perpetuated by similar ideological and political mechanisms. In supporting his argument Peele draws from sources as diverse as television movies and medical journals. The overall result is somewhat disjointed and superficial, but highly readable. In the process, Peele surveys important aspects of social stress which are currently manifested in drug abuse and other social problems. According to Peele, the drug treatment industry, particularly programs that practice on the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), or 12-step model, inculcate an ideology of powerlessness in those they treat and in the larger society, particularly through aggressive marketing. The problem of drug treatment is ironically perpetuated by an ideology of powerlessness which makes an impending loss of control over everyday activities (eating, drinking, sex, etc.) appear more imminent than it actually is. The fear of a loss of control over oneself and one's world becomes a collective obsession stimulated by various social stressors. For the middle class, this collective neurosis is exploited by marketers seeking to fill empty hospital beds and file unnecessary health insurance claims. The medical and social problems of the lower class are largely ignored, except for the attention they receive in the media which reinforces the salience of a loss of control over world events. 1Correspondence should be directed to Gregory Bovasso, Apt. 3116, Irving, Texas 75038. 155 lo53-o789/93/o4oo-o1555o7.oo/o 9 1993 Human SciencesPress, Inc.

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Peele documents how drug treatment based on the 12-step AA model is part of a vicious cycle in which the fear of powerlessness is stimulated by alienation from community and perpetuates the avoidance of community. The disease model of addiction is reified by such treatment so that the concept of addiction degenerates into a primitive notion of demonic possession. The result is the addict's transference of his/her dependency from a substance to a community and its ideology. Like many others, the addict is incapable of interpreting his/her world in a meaningful way. Treatment which transforms and perpetuates this dependency preys on the alienation characteristic of the addict and others. Peele's examination reveals the witch-hunting character of the contemporary temperance movement, which reflects a common pattern of social distress: the demonization of social deviance. Institutions which extend excessive, inappropriate, or otherwise illegitimate control over people must justify this "surplus repression" by using propaganda and other techniques which offer false solutions to the problems which these and competing institutions have created. For example, the legitimacy of the Medieval Catholic Church's political and ideological hegemony was threatened during the Renaissance by other emerging institutions (e.g., science, commerce). The result was a demonization of diverse forms of social deviance which futilely attempted to reassert the hegemony of the Medieval world view. More recently, government-sponsored temperance movements deflect public attention from the government's obligation to address the socioeconomic conditions which promote drug abuse and other forms of social distress. For example, the social construction of "crack babies," a syndrome whose validity recently has been questioned, deflects attention from the lack of neonatal services which produces the symptoms confounded with the "crack baby" syndrome. The modernist ethos has promoted technological social control rather than community-based social control, resulting in a widespread sense of powerlessness and alienation. Modern institutions (e.g., science, commerce) render the individual little more than an automaton whose existence is governed by habit. In the deterministic ontology of behavioral science, all behavior is habitual (e.g., the result of operant and respondent conditioning). The institutions which promote this alienating world view offer technical solutions (e.g., the purchase of therapeutic techniques) which reinforce the alienation and powerlessness by which they regulate social conduct. For example, the 12-step addiction models legitimate the powerlessness of the individual as a habitual consumer of community. Peele's work makes clear that certain approaches to drug treatment do not address the social context which initiates and maintains chemical

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addiction. The 30-day treatment program may cure chemical addiction without addressing the behavioral patterns which initiate and sustain the addiction. However, Peele differentiates drug treatment in therapeutic communities which promote the addict's sense of personal agency from treatment which promotes the addict's dependency on a community. Certain therapeutic communities seek to remedy the social deprivation occurring in the society which undermines human agency. This social deprivation has become increasingly prevalent in a society in which the institutional and moral support of communities has been withdrawn. Demonic attributions for deviant behavior are increasingly tolerated, promoted, and exploited when the communities which make human agency possible are undermined. In essence, Peele observes the manner in which social stress gives rise to growth industries which exploit the public's fear and distress, further exacerbating social distress. Paradoxically, those who seek to ameliorate social distress often unwittingly participate in its institutionalization. A prime example is advocacy seeking to extend medical insurance coverage of disorders which have a strong functional component (e.g., drug abuse, schizophrenia). Such advocacy unwittingly promotes the medicalization of deviance given the retraction of the funding of social programs which aim to address pathogenic social conditions. The long term result of this advocacy is a misdirected search for organic solutions (e.g., a m e t h a d o n e equivalent to cocaine) to disorders that have a functional rather than organic origin. Similarly, advocacy which views disorders with a partial organic basis (e.g., schizophrenia) in strictly organic terms results in inappropriate treatments which further undermine both the sufferer's human status and the obligations of the community to the sufferer. The demonological explanation of increasingly wider domains of human existence destroys the concept and reality of human agency and community, making witch-hunts and purges increasingly acceptable solutions to social distress. Recently, the exploitation of the public's secular demonology by marketers of psychiatric services (e.g., Psychiatric Institutes of America) has created a reactionary backlash against psychotherapy. This backlash has been promoted by the "self-help" industry which ensures its subscribers by glorifying their pathology as well as its resolution through self-help rather than through the competition (i.e., psychotherapy). However, Peele's Diseasing of America predates the current antitherapy self-help movement and offers a critique which is no less applicable to this movement.