Dealing with the damage wrought by dominant metaphors
Metaphors contribute to our everyday lives in many wonderful ways by helping us describe, explain and express what is happening both in our surroundings and in our inner worlds. Just consider the power of the bubble metaphor used in the ‘stay in your bubble’...
Banning alcohol sports sponsorship will mean a big drop in harm
In August 2022, Green Party MP Chlöe Swarbrick’s bill to restrict alcohol advertising and sports sponsorship presented an opportunity to do something meaningful, at last, about the harms alcohol inflicts in our communities. I have been researching the effects of...
Monster metaphors like mental illness block alternative ways of tackling big issues
I often reflect on the wide range of positive functions metaphors play in our daily lives. When I go to my family doctor, I’m likely describe my various ailments as “a shooting pain” or a “dull” ache, or “a band tightening” around my forehead. When speaking with an...
Rethinking addiction in terms of social connections
Addiction is often seen as some form of attribute or condition belonging to an individual person and produced by a complex interaction of that person’s body and mind. I see it differently. I see addiction as primarily a social event, and, through the metaphor of an...
Colonization as a way of understanding violence against women
I find it helpful to think of violence against women as involving similar processes to those operating when one country seeks to colonize another. These may at first seem unrelated, but there are some interesting parallels. When one nation sets out to colonize...
What happens when addiction practitioners in recovery relapse?
The presence of practitioners in recovery from their own addiction as members of teams working with addictions has a critical value in developing service effectiveness. From the point of view of clients coming to a service, the visible presence of recovering...
How to navigate tensions between different ways of addressing problems with alcohol and drugs
Our responses to problems associated with alcohol and drugs are typically informed by three quite different traditions of thinking; traditions which bump up regularly against each other like large tectonic plates, crunching and grinding, leading at times to tremors...
Island Misadventure
Jude and I awoke early on a fine mid-March Saturday morning. We were going on an adventure. Fiona Moir, a colleague in the General Practice department in our School, had invited us to her fiftieth birthday party which she was holding across a weekend on Motutapu,...
Two books launched at a new building at the University of Auckland
On Thursday 12 November, the School of Population Health hosted the launch of two sole-authored books by Professor Peter Adams. This was the first time that an event like this had been held in the new Building 507. The first book, How to Talk about Spiritual...
Finitude is a key concept in understanding existential concerns
The concept of “finitude” is used by a number of thinkers as a catch-all concept that refers to myriad of ways we encounter what bounds and constrains us as we go about our daily lives. The nature of these boundaries is signaled in momentary flashes that pass us...
Advantages in approaching addiction as a social event
A common way of thinking about the ‘self’ is to see it primarily as an individual object and that this object—or particle—is the appropriate focal point for understanding addiction. Indeed, there are several ways I can view myself as a particle. I am certainly a...