How Would You React to a Colleague’s Substance Abuse: With Compassion or Disgust?

You are eating breakfast one morning before work.  Your television is on for the local news broadcast, but you’re not paying that much attention to it.  Except when the news anchor mentions the name of one of your work colleagues.  You glance at the TV to see a quick report of how he was arrested for public intoxication during the night.

How do you react?  With surprise at first.  But what are your follow-on thoughts?  Do you look down upon him from a high perch of moral superiority?  When you arrive at the office do you participate in negative gossip with fellow employees about your colleague’s drunken episode?  Should he be fired?  Will he tarnish your employer’s reputation, and you by extension? How could you work with such an undisciplined bum? 

Would your thoughts about your co-worker be different if the news report was about his diagnosis of cancer, or heart disease?  In that case your feelings would most likely be those of compassion and support.  But did you know that substance addiction has been recognized as a disease since this country’s early history? 

One of America’s Founding Fathers, Dr. Benjamin Rush (a signer of the U.S. Declaration of Independence), was one of the first medical providers to use the term “addiction” in reference to the loss of control accompanying alcoholism.  Dr. Rush observed in 1805 that drunkenness resembles certain hereditary diseases.  He argued that “habitual drunkenness” should be regarded as a disease.  Modernly, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism continues to recognize alcoholism as a disease.  Formal diagnostic criteria for alcoholism are included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, published by the American Psychiatric Association, as well as in the International Classification Diseases, published by the World Health Organization.

In Bakersfield, California, an attorney for the public defender’s office was arrested and charged with being drunk in public.  But instead of throwing him to the curb, his office-mates have shown support for him, saying they will stand by him.  Now this is not to say that the attorney even has an addiction problem.  That’s not what we’re saying here.  It turns out that a death in the family may have precipitated the event.  The point is his office and co-workers showed him support, and not the door.
 
One of the Marine Corps’ 11 Leadership Traits is to “Know Your Marines and Look Out for Their Welfare.”  Do you as a civilian employer know your employees and look after their welfare?  Or do you know nothing about them, and cast them aside at the first bump in the road?   We think the Bakersfield Public Defender’s Office is made up of leaders. 

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