{"id":673577,"date":"2026-07-04T15:09:22","date_gmt":"2026-07-04T15:09:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/673577\/"},"modified":"2026-07-04T15:09:22","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T15:09:22","slug":"does-academic-culture-support-addiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/673577\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Academic Culture Support Addiction?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lately I\u2019ve noticed a growing number of discussions about addiction in academia. In just the last year, excessive drinking, drug use, and stigma<\/a> in the professoriate have been featured in scientific journals, influential career<\/a> podcasts, professional society newsletters, and trade periodicals. Several of these pieces include candid self-disclosures from faculty and research scientists who are affected by addiction. <\/p>\n

On the one hand, this isn\u2019t surprising given the recent sea change in acknowledging lived experience in promoting mental health. On the other hand, it is surprising because stigma toward addiction is deeply entrenched in academia, something I\u2019ve experienced firsthand and something I write about in my new memoir.<\/p>\n

Most recently, I read Scott Carlson\u2019s article in the Chronicle of Higher Education<\/a> (Higher Ed\u2019s Hidden Substance-Abuse Problem). Carlson documents struggles faced by young faculty members in academic environments where expectations are high, but criteria for promotion are, as is often the case, vague. This combination of pressure and uncertainty, according to Carlson\u2019s sources, is a recipe for excess substance use and, for some, addiction.<\/p>\n

As a former academic who\u2019s confronted addiction, I read any content on substance abuse<\/a> in academia with keen interest. Carlson and others rightly describe an academic culture that amplifies vulnerability to addiction. Unrealistic expectations, unending comparisons to extremely successful peers, and proscriptions against expressing vulnerability of any kind, lest that vulnerability be used against us the next time we take an unpopular position in our home department, apply for a federal grant, or err in ordinary ways that would be written off for anyone else whose personal foibles are unknown. In such a culture, any upsides of coming out with one\u2019s addiction and seeking treatment are swamped by an avalanche of consequences to one\u2019s career.<\/p>\n

Although greater attention<\/a> to addiction in academia is long overdue, most discussions miss two essential points. First, the pressure to produce in modern academic culture isn\u2019t new or unique. Four decades ago, we embarked on a corporatization pathway to cope with dwindling public funding. Since then, pressure for grants, notoriety, and private donations has intensified to once-unimaginable levels. The academic milieu often described in our discussions about addiction stems from the corporate culture we adopted\u2014the same culture found in all high-achieving professions, including law, medicine, finance, and more.<\/p>\n

Second, well-respected senior faculty who suffer from substance use disorders must come out if we\u2019re to humanize and destigmatize addiction and change the highly punitive culture surrounding it. It\u2019s unfair to burden our current generation of young scholars with addressing a problem they didn\u2019t create. Without authoritative examples, highly achieving young faculty will likely, over the years, become inculcated in the system they inherited from colleagues like me, who for decades hid our addiction because the consequences of coming out would have been catastrophic to our identity<\/a> and career.<\/p>\n

Research shows that addiction is blind to socioeconomic status, gender<\/a>, race, and occupation. This tells us that far more academics\u2014including world-renowned senior scholars\u2014are affected by addiction than we know or acknowledge. <\/p>\n

In the U.S., substance use disorders are the most stigmatized of all mental health conditions. Fighting this stigma, both inside and outside academia, depends on humanizing addiction, not hiding it. Such can only be accomplished by putting human faces on the problem. Human faces we know and respect. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lately I\u2019ve noticed a growing number of discussions about addiction in academia. In just the last year, excessive…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":673578,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-673577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=673577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/673578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=673577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=673577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=673577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}