" Logotherapy " psychiatrist Viktor Frankl had good advice for drug addicts too

Beautiful Boy: Part of the truth about drug addiction

 

Right away the film title strikes me as false : " Beautiful Boy ". The last documentary I watched on the " Crack " epidemic  shows how quickly and dramatically these drug addicts lost their good looks. You would think normal vanity would keep kids away from these poison street drugs.

     " The immensity of the dilemma cannot be the product of “lifestyle choices” or individual human failings—unless one believes in the Fall of Man and Original Sin. Everything points to a socially produced crisis. "

            Without approving of the permanent and ever failing WAR ON DRUGS I agree that mass addiction is a social disease. Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl , got this right : knowing your life has some higher MEANING is a big factor in personal survival and everyday mental health.

            The famous psychiatrist ( founder of " logotherapy " school ) and author of " Man's Search for Meaning " even applied his insights to the plight of jobless people in times of recession or depression.

 He tells them that their life is not meaningless because they are unemployed. There is always something to live for.

               Curiously Dr. Frankl believed that nobody was beyond " redemption " ( not even old Nazis ? ) Certainly not drug addicts and alcoholics.

[YOLO, Unemployment and Concentration Camps

Since leaving university, I myself and several of my close friends have experienced bouts of depression whilst being unemployed, but can a lack of nine to five really be what’s getting us down or is there something else that’s actually missing?
It’s wasn’t until I recently picked up the book ‘Man’s Search For Meaning’ by Viktor Frankl that I realised that there is an actual term for this condition known as Unemployment Neurosis in which being jobless is equated with being useless, and being useless is equated with having a meaningless life. ]