Ben comes clean for uni study JAKE NIALL
August 11, 2010 IN A frank interview for a soon-to-be-published international academic journal, Ben Cousins has told a pair of Melbourne researchers how he had been treated more positively when receiving drug treatment in the US than in Australia.
Cousins has contrasted how Americans were willing to ''high five'' him during his stay in a drug and alcohol treatment centre with an Australian environment in which his addiction was ''looked down upon'' by society. But the researchers said that the Brownlow medallist did not ''whinge'' about his lot and was simply explaining how he viewed his situation.
Cousins, whose future with Richmond is yet to be settled, was interviewed by Monash University academics Dr Kate Seear and Dr Suzanne Fraser for an article that will be published later this year in British-based social science/public health journal Critical Public Health.
The article, which is the second on Cousins by the pair (the first was not based on interview), is expected to be published in September or October. The interview took place late last year.
Cousins also told the academics, who are from the Department of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash:
■To deny that he had taken drugs was worse than actually taking them.
■He drew a link between his disciplined training regime and his propensity to party - though he did not necessarily ''reward'' himself for effort.
''He sort of said that the partying side is part and parcel of the ability to discipline yourself to go hard and train hard for weeks on end, and I think he said at one point he went for a month without putting butter on his toast and then he has a kind of [response] to that … control by having a big kind of party, party night or whatever,'' said Fraser, who has interviewed hundreds of drug users in Sydney and Melbourne.
''It's the prospect of being able to do something different that gets him through the training. It's the kind other side of self-denial. We talked about the fact that taking drugs or partying's not the opposite of self-discipline and focus. For some people, some people who are supremely successful, it can be part of it.''
■That he considered himself an addict - a self-assessment they believed was genuine. ''We were convinced that he genuinely saw himself as an addict. We were very interested in that,'' Fraser said.
Fraser said of Cousins's American experience: ''He talked to us about going to the US and the different treatment of the idea of addiction over there and … finding himself sort of regularly congratulated and lauded as a recovering addict and how that was kind of so different from in Australia where you're just looked down upon.
''So he's sort of drawing a contrast between a culture that rewards admitting addiction and treating it, and a culture that simply wants to kind of discard the addict in his view. He said, 'you walk out and everyone's giving you high fives'.''
Cousins was twice admitted to a drug treatment centre in Malibu, California, during 2007. The article examines Cousins's treatment by media and public. Seear said there had been ''a series of mixed messages about who Cousins is, what drug addiction or drug use is, [and] how he is expected to behave''.
''Certainly a substantial proportion of the media coverage, I would say, in the early days … spoke about him being insufficiently contrite and then not genuinely remorseful for his behaviour and … quite a bit of speculation about the extent to which he really believed himself to be an addict or whether that was a strategic deployment of the term in order to garner favour or whatever.''
Fraser doubted Cousins saw himself as having a disease. ''He clearly, clearly had a sense of himself as being physically fit and strong and not as harmed by his other activities, including taking drugs. So in a way I find it hard to imagine him going so far as [to say] he had a disease.
''The paper in part talks about his sense of relief, the kind of opening up the issue, because in his mind to proceed as though drug taking was something he never did was much more inauthentic experience than taking drugs. Not being able to to be honest and say, 'yes, I'm a fantastic sportsman and sometimes I party and take drugs', to deny those things went together in his life he said felt like a lie.
''We found interesting … what he was pointing to was that it's more the social opprobrium that forces people to deny what is quite a common thing.''
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/ben-comes-clean-for-uni-study-20100810-11y88.html
