Substance abuse disorder patients struggle to get treatment because of stigma

Johnny Bousquet should have gone to urgent care earlier. He has insurance and plenty of sick time. But after decades of feeling beat up, ignored, and shamed by the medical system as a recovering addict, Bousquet says he avoids it all together — often choosing instead to engage in a game of chicken with whatever ailment he’s battling.

This time, he was losing. His flu-like symptoms worsened and stretched on for weeks. Finally, one morning – in a delirium of nausea and unrelenting thirst — he called his co-worker to tell her he wasn’t coming in and drove himself to a hospital in west Seattle. Staff took some labs and told him to settle in for a long wait.

Ten minutes later, two urgent care nurses came out looking alarmed.

“I could just tell something was really wrong, the way they were looking at me,” Bousquet says. “I was like ‘What – is the flu this bad?’ “

Diabetes. It came on suddenly for Bousquet. He had no idea. “They were like, ‘We’re taking you across the street,’ “he says. ” ‘Your A1C is higher than we’ve ever seen it before.’ ” A1C is a measure of blood sugar.

The diagnosis would change his life forever, but it was in some ways the easier of the two difficult problems he was grappling with that day. For diabetes there are tests, medication, protocols and empathy. None of these tools were available to Bousquet to help him mitigate the stigma he faced from the medical system because he has struggled with substance abuse.

Substance use disorder has long been classified as a disease, but Bousquet and others like him who are in recovery say stigma around this condition is pervasive in the field of medicine. Their stories illustrate the steep social and financial costs of stigma not only for the people who are in recovery but for communities across the country who are grappling with high rates of addiction.

Policies have allowed…