For most people, the high school experience was just barely about learning anything. Largely, high school is more daycare than educational institution. This is a shame, because there are many things a young person needs to learn at that time besides math and history. As alcohol addiction and opioid abuse become rampant and overdose deaths increase, two of the things people are the most woefully uneducated over is substance abuse and addiction. They do not know what it means to be addicted. They do not know how to avoid addiction. Alcohol rehab and drug abuse treatment options were seldomly discussed with authority figures. In addition, they often have no idea what to do when someone else is suffering from an addiction — or worse, an overdose.
The result is that you, as an employer, might have to be the one who explains the dangers of substance abuse and addiction to your employees. It is not an ideal job. However, it is not an impossible one either. We will help you by going over the process of educating them.
Step One: Introducing the Topic with Authority
The thing about addiction is that there is no way to talk about it casually. If you try to subtly engage an employee on the topic one-on-one in order to educate them without their noticing, you will be putting a lot of effort into something that is unlikely to stick. Educating people requires that you know what you are talking about. In addition, with addiction, people will go so long without knowing anything about it that they will begin to form their own biases.
You have to try to work past those biases. In addition, that means getting people together, standing so that there is a clear separation between you and them, and talking to them like they do not know anything. Of course, you need to show up knowing as much as you can about addiction for this to work. Therefore, get education on how addiction works beforehand to answer any questions.
Step Two: Start Relatable
Once you have educated yourself and rallied your employees to listen to you speak, what do you do then? The answer is that you start by talking about substance abuse in the most relatable terms possible, beginning by talking about recreational drug and alcohol use. Everyone, at some point, will consume drugs or alcohol. It is a massive statistical anomaly if a person manages to avoid it until they are working age. You should acknowledge this and put forward the fact that you do not intend to cast all drug and alcohol users in the light of addiction.
This is important because one so often characterizes addiction as a repeated bad choice. In addition, when characterized this way, it is easy to dismiss by saying, “You should just never have done drugs or consumed alcohol.” Considering those are things that most people do, treating people like they should never do them would put your message at odds with human nature. Emphasize this and point out your attempt to educate about addiction by going along with the human tendency to consume these substances, rather than the expectation that a person meets an impossible standard of purity for their entire life to be considered worth empathy.
Step Three: After Relatability Comes Reality
If your employees know that you are not treating them as villains for being in the same room as drugs and alcohol, then they will listen to you talk about the dangers of drugs and alcohol. What dangers should you teach them about? Well remember, you are working outwards from relatability. The most common reason people get addicted to drugs and alcohol is that they hang out with friends and use these substances recreationally. Remind your employees that this is not evil, and you are not judging them. The point is that it can happen to anyone.
Nobody plans to get an addiction to drugs or alcohol. It happens because they overindulge. In addition, the real complex thing about using these substances — the thing that schools should teach but do not ―is that overindulgence is basically impossible to keep track of because it is so individualized. What is overindulgence for one person is normal for another person. This does explain why so much of society believes that the only solution is to avoid the substances entirely.
The nuance is unknowable, so how do you teach someone to respect it? The answer is that you tell your employees to find out what their limits have been thus far, and to stick to them. Every excessive night of drinking, smoking, snorting, or shooting is a risk.
Step Four: What to Do If It All Goes Wrong
Educating on addiction is not just about talking about how addiction forms and how to avoid it. You should also let your employees know how to respond to addiction if it appears. Teach them what to do in case of an overdose, whether they are overdosing or someone else is, and where to go to get treatment for addiction. Remind them, and yourself, that you are not their resource for dealing with addiction. Ideally, they can talk to you. However, no employee should be expected to tell their boss that they have a compromising condition like an addiction. They should be going to New Waters Recovery or some similar detox center for help.
Conclusion
Addiction is simple to define from the outside. You can look at any addict on the street and point out the matter of fact that they have an addiction. However, the closer you get to it, the more complex it becomes. There are plenty of functional addicts that you cannot point out, for instance.
However, more than that, educating about addiction needs to focus on the fact that anyone can make the mistakes that result in an addiction, and that anyone can recover from it as well. Establish authority, offer relatability, bring down reality, and then close by telling them what to do in an emergency. That is how you educate employees about addiction.
