Medical Disease or Moral Defect? Stigma Attribution and Cultural Models of Addiction Causality in a University Population

This study examines the knowledge individuals use to make judgments about persons with substance use disorder. First, we show that there is a cultural model of addiction causality that is both shared and contested. Second, we examine how individuals’ understanding of that model is associated with st...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Culture, medicine and psychiatry medicine and psychiatry, 2017-12, Vol.41 (4), p.480-498
Main Authors: Henderson, Nicole L., Dressler, William W.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Addictions
Adolescent
Adult
Anthropology
Attribution
Causality
Clinical Psychology
College students
Cultural differences
Cultural groups
Culture
Disorders
Drug education
Drug use
Drugs
Ethics
Female
Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice - ethnology
Humans
Male
Medicine
Models, Psychological
Morality
Morals
Original Paper
Psychiatry
Public Health
Respondents
Self-medication
Social Sciences
Social Stigma
Sociology
Stigma
Students
Substance abuse
Substance abuse treatment
Substance use disorder
Substance-Related Disorders - ethnology
Undergraduate education
Undergraduate students
Universities
Young Adult
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Summary:This study examines the knowledge individuals use to make judgments about persons with substance use disorder. First, we show that there is a cultural model of addiction causality that is both shared and contested. Second, we examine how individuals’ understanding of that model is associated with stigma attribution. Research was conducted among undergraduate students at the University of Alabama. College students in the 18–25 age range are especially at risk for developing substance use disorder, and they are, perhaps more than any other population group, intensely targeted by drug education. The elicited cultural model includes different types of causes distributed across five distinct themes: Biological, Self-Medication, Familial, Social, and Hedonistic. Though there was cultural consensus among respondents overall, residual agreement analysis showed that the cultural model of addiction causality is a multicentric domain. Two centers of the model, the moral and the medical, were discovered. Differing adherence to these centers is associated with the level of stigma attributed towards individuals with substance use disorder. The results suggest that current approaches to substance use education could contribute to stigma attribution, which may or may not be inadvertent. The significance of these results for both theory and the treatment of addiction are discussed.
ISSN:0165-005X
1573-076X
DOI:10.1007/s11013-017-9531-1