Addiction In Social Work

Addiction, derived in the late sixteenth century from a Latin word addictus, simply means the fact or condition of being addicted to particular substance or activity (Oxford Dictionaries, 2015).

According to Albery (2006), addiction is as a term used to describe a person’s physical and psychological dependency on a behaviour, which may or may not involve the ingestion of a mood-altering psychoactive drug such as alcohol, nicotine, cannabis, opiates or amphetamines.

World Health Organization defines addiction, with emphasis on drug or alcohol, as repeated use of a psychoactive substance or substances, to the extent that the user, who is generally referred to as an addict, is periodically or chronically intoxicated, shows a compulsion to take

Farley (2003) opines that social workers not only focus on helping people to improve their social functioning and their ability to interact and relate to others, but also focus on assisting individuals in solving their individual and personal problems.

Nowadays, due to the increasing number of people with alcohol problem, social workers can easily encounter alcohol-addicted individuals in most of social work practice areas, for instance, in child abuse, domestic violence, poverty, elderly services, juvenile delinquency, as well as mental health clinics (National Association of Social Workers, 2015) .

As mentioned in National Association of Social Workers’ catalogue (2015), social workers bring a much-needed ecological perspective to the work in this field, seeing that social workers see clients in regards to the family, neighbourhood, support system from the community, and spiritual level instead of only focusing on their individual’s addiction or substance misuse problem. That being said, corresponding to Farley (2003), social workers need to have particular skills in order to understand these particular people, to be able to identify their problems and eventually help them