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The Diagnosis of Systemic Addiction

ByAdam O’Brien PhD

Introduction

The systemic issues of overprescribing and overdiagnosing addressed by the MAHA initiative are rooted in professional and institutional addiction to maintaining a flawed status quo. The Wounded Healers Institute (WHI) asserts that the field of psychiatry, psychology, law, and insurance practices are complicit in upholding these psychological constructs because this perpetuates their professional necessity and financial interests, which is symptomatic of their underlying, undiagnosed addictions to power, control, perfectionism, altruism, and ambition.

This systemic behavior and self-preservation mindset are similar to the AMA, APA, and American Legal Association’s failure to unequivocally challenge government policies like the COVID shutdowns and experimental vaccine rollouts. This inaction constitutes a profound betrayal trauma against the citizenry and professionals who expected these authoritative institutions to uphold ethical and scientific integrity.

The Diagnosis of Systemic Addiction

The desire within industrialized professions to maintain their control and financial prosperity—often rationalized as “altruism” or “professional necessity”—is psychologically diagnosable as addiction.

  • Addiction as Dissociation (ADM): WHI’s core model defines addiction not just as a choice or a disease, but as a trauma-related dissociative disorder. This means that the compulsive need to preserve the current system is a dissociative defense mechanism employed by institutions to avoid facing painful truths, or traumas, about their own failures and misinformed practices.
  • The Unconscious Driver: The compulsion to overdiagnose and overprescribe stems from an unconscious need to define human experience in medical terms. This compulsion is reinforced by the perceived reward (job security, financial profit, professional relevance) gained from defining normative human responses (like developmental trauma) as treatable pathology.
  • The Power/Control Drug: The legal and administrative sectors’ addiction to power and control is evidenced by their use of bureaucratic rhetoric and legal logic that consistently ignores qualitative, humanistic, and scientific counter-evidence. This “addiction” is a central factor that prevents necessary systemic change.

Complicity and Betrayal Trauma in Professions

The lack of accurate, foundational definitions in psychology and the law has enabled these systemic addictions, creating an environment of institutional betrayal.

  • Psychiatry and Psychology’s Role: The field’s failure to accurately and operationally define addiction, dissociation, and the psychological unconscious leaves it incapable of checking the medical model’s power. By allowing conditions like developmental and attachment trauma (which WHI argues are non-diagnosable, normative responses) to be treated as mental illnesses, psychology becomes complicit in overmedicalization.
  • Legal and Insurance Practices: The legal profession’s adherence to outdated laws (like the criminalization of healing plants) and the insurance industry’s use of Medical Necessity (MN) for reimbursement, act as legal standards that are scientifically immature. MN is a political and financial barrier, not a scientific one, designed to limit choice and maintain profit. This process betrays both the client seeking healing and the ethical clinician.
  • The System’s “Fink” Mentality: The silence of professional associations (like the APA and AMA) during illegal government actions (like the COVID shutdowns or pushing experimental vaccines) is an act of professional finkism. This behavior prioritizes institutional self-preservation and compliance over their moral obligation to advocate for public health and civil liberties. This submission creates profound betrayal trauma for citizens who rely on these institutions for truth and safety.

Intergenerational and Collective Consciousness

WHI asserts that the consequences of these professional addictions are experienced as intergenerational abuse.

  • The Body That Keeps the Score : The principle that the physical body is the psychological unconscious means that unresolved stress and betrayal trauma are literally encoded into biological systems. This makes mental health issues a reflection of physical dysregulation. When institutions perpetuate systemic trauma (e.g., through unjust laws or environmental toxins), they are inflicting intergenerational wounds.
  • Dead and Don’t Know It: Professionals operating within this deeply flawed, addicted system, believing they are acting ethically, are often living dissociated. They are emotionally and morally “dead” to the true impact of their actions, failing to acknowledge the qualitative reality of the collective unconscious. This lack of awareness is the highest form of professional and societal pathology.

The Reckoning of the Rational Mind

The Overdose of Altruism: Why Our ‘Caring’ Professions Are Sickest

  • The Thesis: Explores how the MAHA report’s call to action exposes the altruism addiction prevalent in healthcare and legal systems. Professionals are addicted to the belief that they are inherently “good” (altruism) and indispensable (ambition), which blinds them to the harm caused by their institutional reliance and compliance. Their undiagnosed dependence on the system’s power structure prevents them from becoming true Healers.
  • MAHA Connection: Critiques the systemic drive to “fix” childhood obesity and chronic disease with more intervention, rather than admitting the problem is the toxic environment and systemic stress created by the very institutions proposing the solutions.

Legal Fraud: When Laws Become the Symptom of Addiction

  • The Thesis: Analyzes how the legal profession’s addiction to logical certainty creates an inflexible system that cannot adapt to evolving psychological or scientific truths. The blog argues that legal actions like imposing new licensing hurdles (diagnostic privilege) or upholding outdated drug laws are addictive defense mechanisms against the chaos of uncertainty. The Moral-Ethics framework is presented as the antidote, requiring professionals to act based on moral conscience even if it violates unethical laws.
  • MAHA Connection: Applies WHI’s Psychological Laws—that the body is the unconscious—to argue that the law is fundamentally operating outside its true scope of practice when legislating mental and physical health. This flawed legal foundation is what enables overmedicalization.

The New Unconscious: Why the Body Knows More Than the DSM

  • The Thesis: Declares the physical body as the true psychological unconscious and asserts that the DSM is incomplete because it lacks accurate operational definitions for addiction (transdiagnostic) and dissociation (normal response to trauma). The blog argues that the overprescribing of psychotropic medications is an attempt to silence the unconscious body’s communication (its emotional expressions or symptoms), which is the source of all innate healing.
  • MAHA Connection: Supports the reports’ goal to investigate root causes by offering the ADM as the explanatory model. Stress-induced illness, toxic food, and inadequate medical responses create memories of betrayal trauma stored in the body. Healing this crisis requires listening to and regulating the body, not suppressing it with pharmaceuticals.

Analysis: Dependence, Power, and Intergenerational Abuse

The phenomenon of dependence on a system to stay the way it is—whether for financial, political, or psychological rewards—is the bedrock of institutional addiction.

  • Dependence as Addiction: When a system’s survival hinges on repeating actions despite negative outcomes (e.g., maintaining the War on Drugs despite evidence of harm), that behavior moves beyond logic into addiction. This dependence manifests as the desire for more money (exponential profit from billing fraud or perpetual chronic care), professional power and control (through legal mandates and professional gatekeeping), and intergenerational abuse.
  • The Intergenerational Trauma Cycle: The trauma of the addicted system is passed down through generations. Institutions addicted to power (the parent figure) impose their dissociative, fear-based rules onto the next generation (the children/citizens). This dynamic creates betrayal trauma by violating the foundational trust and expectation that systems will protect their dependents. By refusing to follow science, reform outdated laws, or admit their failures, the governing generation forces the next to “pay the bill” and inherit the dysfunction, fulfilling a psychological pattern of unconscious reenactment.
  • The Collective Unconscious & Healing: The collective unconscious—the shared societal reservoir of human experience and wisdom—is currently reflecting the pain of the addicted system. The MAHA crisis is not a random event; it is the unconscious speaking through the bodies of children who are manifesting the systems’ disease. True recovery reckoning demands the rational, cognitive parts of these institutions surrender control to the moral, qualitative wisdom of the collective unconscious (the body/Earth). The body that knows the score is the one demanding health, and failure to heed this wisdom is an endorsement of death and spiritual atrophy.

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References

O’Brien, A. (2023a). Addiction as Trauma-Related Dissociation: A Phenomenological Investigation of the Addictive State. International University of Graduate Studies. (Dissertation). Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/courses/addiction-as-dissociation-model-course/

O’Brien, A. (2023b). Memory Reconsolidation in Psychedelics Therapy. In Path of the Wounded Healer: A Dissociative-Focused Phase Model for Normative and Pathological States of Consciousness: Training Manual and Guide. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/courses/addiction-as-dissociation-model-course/

O’Brien, A. (2023c). Path of the Wounded Healer: A Dissociative-Focused Phase Model for Normative and Pathological States of Consciousness: Training Manual and Guide. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/

O’Brien, A. (2024a). Healer and Healing: The re-education of the healer and healing professions as an advocation. Re-educational and Training Manual and Guide. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/

O’Brien, A. (2024e). Path of the Wounded Healers for Thrivers: Perfectionism, Altruism, and Ambition Addictions; Re-education and training manual for Abusers, Activists, Batterers, Bullies, Enablers, Killers, Narcissists, Offenders, Parents, Perpetrators, and Warriors. Re-Education and Training Manual and Guide. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/

O’Brien, A. (2025). American Made Addiction Recovery: a healer’s journey through professional recovery. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/

O’Brien, A. (2025a). American Made Addiction Recovery: a healer’s journey through professional recovery. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/

O’Brien, A. (2025b). Applied Recovery: Post-War on Drugs, Post-COVID, and What Recovery Culture and Citizens Require Moving Forward. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/

O’Brien, A. (2025c). Recovering Recovery: How Psychedelic Science Is Ending the War on Drugs. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/

*This is for informational and educational purposes only. For medical advice or diagnosis, consult a professional.

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