The problem of over-medicalisation: How AOD disease models perpetuate inequity for young people with multiple disadvantage

Abstract

Young people who experience multiple disadvantage have been identified as some of the most marginalised and under-serviced people in the alcohol and other drug (AOD) system. In this paper, we draw on a range of research evidence to argue that one of the challenges in responding appropriately to the needs of these young people are models of care which seek to ameliorate 'illness' rather than promote wellness. While disease approaches have some important benefits, overly-medicalised AOD treatment responses also have negative impacts. We argue that disease models rest on understandings of substance use as an individual enterprise and thereby pay insufficient attention to the material disadvantage that shape young people's substance use, creating feelings of shame, failure and a reluctance to return to care if they continue to use. Additionally we draw on literature that shows how disease models construe young people's substance use as compulsive, perpetuating deficit views of them as irrational and failing to account for the specific meanings that young people themselves give to their substance use. By focusing on clinical solutions rather than material and relational ones, medicalised treatment responses perpetuate inequity: they benefit young people whose resources and normative values align with the treatments offered by disease models, but are much less helpful to those who are under-resourced,. We suggest that alternative approaches can be found in First Nations models of care and youth programs that attend to social, cultural, and material wellbeing, making living well the focus of treatment rather than illness amelioration.

Keywords: Alcohol and drug treatment; Medicalisation; Multiple disadvantage; Young people.