# Philip Seymour Hoffman has died.

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-seymour-hoffman-has-died/680364>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Created:** [February 2, 2014, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-seymour-hoffman-has-died/680364 "2014-02-02T18:34:31Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 142

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![phouka](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/c5a1d2/32.png) [@phouka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/phouka)\
**Post date:** [February 4, 2014, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-seymour-hoffman-has-died/680364/142 "2014-02-04T03:58:24Z")

</div>

> [@](#):
>
> It’s not a disease.
> 
> Calling it a disease makes people feel like it “isn’t their fault”.
> 
> Being an addict is not something that happens unless you expose yourself to something and your body/brain says you can’t live without another “fix.” Whether it be gambling, drugs, sex, or whatever, the addiction is real, but calling it a disease removes responsibility away from the addict and puts it on some mysterious, uncontrollable genetic trigger that absolves the addict from the responsibility of their dangerous and selfish behavior.
> 
> Sorry, i didn’t mean to hijack this thread and i know there is a better place for this, but I just get so frustrated when people call addiction a disease.
> 
> Someone didn’t sneeze on PSH and make him a heroin addict. He did that all by himself. He could have been in a room full of heroin and heroin addicts shooting up, and he would have been just fine. When he decided to put that drug in his body (by himself, not being tied down and forced to ingest it against his will), and continued to do it, he created his own problem. Calling it a disease is not fair to the countless diseases out there that are real.
> 
> This is a sad death, but he didn’t die from ALS or cancer.

And yet, people do things that make it more likely they’ll develop cancer, like smoking, drinking, eating meat, becoming obese, or climbing into tanning beds. People diagnosed with Type II diabetes are often judged for their own personal failing regarding diet and exercise.

And yet, some populations are far more likely to develop addictions than others, just as Native Americans are more likely to suffer from alcoholism.

And yet, most diseases, especially those diseases which riddle our modern populations, aren’t caused by one person sneezing on another. You don’t catch heart disease that way. Or Alzheimer’s.

And yet, there are inheritable traits which cause one person to be more susceptible to an addiction than another.

And yet, there are plenty of other diseases, like depression, OCD, and social phobia, whose primary treatment was once being told by others, “well, if you’d just choose to be happy/relaxed/not shy”.

And yet, people who commit suicide were once judged as cowards instead of understood as being in such a state of suffering, killing themselves was the better option.

And yet, there are physical changes in the brains of addicts which make it impossible to maintain emotional and physical homeostasis without either another fix or some heavy duty medical intervention.

The point here is that addiction is far more complicated than “well, if he’d just stood there and hadn’t injected smack in his veins, he wouldn’t be dead”, and that blaming and shaming addicts leads only to worse outcomes. The choice is not between “it’s his own damn fault” and “poor bastard, he had no control over his fate”. Successful treatment doesn’t start with “you asshole, stop doing H”.

Demonizing addicts only leads to more deaths. Please stop doing it.

---

_[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/philip-seymour-hoffman-has-died/680364)._