What is it about?
The language around alcohol use disorder is saturated with metaphor. Addiction is often positioned as something to battle, escape, navigate, or overcome. Recovery is a journey, and treatment services offer tools. This research examines the framing effects of the metaphors used in alcohol support materials, and how they may shape how people think about their situation – what it means, how to cope, and whether change feels possible.
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Why is it important?
Low treatment-seeking rates for alcohol use disorder are often attributed to ongoing stigma, feelings of shame, and a perceived lack of agency. Understanding how metaphor encodes agency and responsibility is therefore essential for designing health communication that supports engagement with treatment. This work is one of the first in-depth analyses of how alcohol dependence is metaphorically constructed in widely accessed support materials. The findings show that Journey framings dominate in this context, highlighting both the long-term nature and potential impermanence of recovery. Individuals are represented with varying degrees of agency at different stages of dependence, and framings acknowledging mitigated agency tend to anthropomorphise AUD itself in violent and highly agentive terms. These findings provide critical evidence that the metaphors embedded in support materials can shape how individuals interpret their experiences and assess their own potential for change, highlighting an urgent need for reflective and empirically-informed health communication strategies in addiction contexts.
Perspectives
Addiction sits at the intersection of physical and mental health, yet it is too often left out of both conversations. I’ve found that when it comes to addiction, communication is full of invisible barriers. Many of us may often feel that we lack the linguistic resources to have effective conversations. This project was an attempt to map those barriers and ask how we might do better. I hope it encourages support providers, policymakers, and researchers to reflect on the role of language in shaping people’s experiences of health, illness, and care.
Sinead Jackson
University College London
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Falling, slipping, and stumbling backwards, Metaphor and the Social World, December 2024, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/msw.24022.jac.
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