My first real job after leaving the military as a young man was at an HIV/AIDS service agency in Manhattan. Our clients were primarily former (or not so former) heroin users.

Besides managing our computer network, I taught job skill classes most afternoons and so got to know many of our clients really well.

I learned for one thing that the classical crash/recovery narrative you’re talking about is often not how the real world works.

My afternoon students covered an entire gamut of experiences. Some of them had indeed reached rock bottom and struggled with some pretty terrible things. Others, though, had managed years or decades of moderate heroin use without the sort of classic horror stories that define the common narrative.

I’m not trying to downplay addiction problems, and everyone at the agency was there because they were HIV positive, which is not trivial.

But I think what surprised me the most is how addiction stereotypes could damage our clients. Our social workers and case managers went to some lengths to treat clients as individuals, but they often complained that other agencies would not do that.

When you try to shoehorn individuals into the rock-bottom/recovery paradigm, they can end up ill served if they don’t actually fit that paradigm.