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The person not the drug
Phil Barker, Honorary Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Nursing, University of Dundee
Abstract
The idea of focusing on the person rather than the drug is full of paradox: simple in principle but complex in practice. The more we ask ‘what is a person?’ the less clear becomes the answer.
Most people accept without question that drugs are not ‘the problem’. Rather, what people do with drugs is the problem. An alternative view, which I shall explore in this presentation, is that ‘problems with drugs’ are just like every other problem people encounter in their lives. Each begs questions about the meaning of our lives.
This view involves a radical attitude to drug use – indeed to any human problem. It assumes that the person is the star, the producer, director and key scriptwriter of the life story.
For various reasons, much of the help offered to people who use drugs focuses on helping them to manage their physical relationship with drugs. When we refocus our attention on the person – especially the unique meanings, motivations, values, and assumptions of this particular person - we begin to appreciate the paradox that, in some sense, everyone is like everyone else; but in another sense is like no one else.
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Biography
Dr Phil Barker is a psychotherapist in private practice and Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Nursing at the University of Dundee. He has published 25 books, fifty book chapters, and over 250 academic and professional papers and articles. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing in 1995 and was awarded the Red Gate Award for Distinguished Professors at the University of Tokyo in 2000. He was made an honorary Doctor of the University at Oxford Brookes University in 2001 and received the Inaugural “Lifetime Achievement Award” from Blackwell Publishers for his contribution to mental health in 2007. In New York, in 2008, he was the joint winner, with his wife and colleague Poppy-Buchanan-Barker, of the “Thomas S Szasz Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of Civil Liberties.”
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