Who is flying the plane of your wellbeing?

In France, and health above all, we tend to value studies and qualifications far more than lived experience.

So a doctor will generally be seen as more credible than someone who has lived through and got past a string of addictions. Put like that, the claim may not shock you. But what if I asked: which pilot would you choose — the one who knows the flight manual by heart, or the one who has flown thousands of hours in the aircraft you are about to board?

And yet most of the people we hand our health over to spent the bulk of their training memorising and theorising, far from the field. I am talking here about the content of university courses, whose practical relevance is often limited — not about the clinical experience acquired afterwards.

You will agree that in a better world it would be excellent if the experienced pilot and the manual expert flew together. Only in our world, and in France in particular, it is very often the manual expert — the one who did the studying — who flies, while the experienced pilot is demoted to passenger. So why do we hand over power for our own wellbeing so readily to people with qualifications, and therefore mostly on a theoretical basis?

That imbalance is a well-known phenomenon called authority bias. It describes our tendency to be more swayed by the opinions of authority figures — the white coat — without assessing what they actually say.

The bias was demonstrated by the Milgram experiment, in which participants were urged by a professor in a white coat to deliver increasingly strong electric shocks — fictitious, but believed real by the participants — to a subject who was in fact an actor.

An overwhelming majority of those participants carried on to the maximum charge, simply because the authority said: "Continue, the experiment requires that you continue."

That study showed the enormous power of status over decision-making, and explains why so many people can act against their own judgement under the pressure of authority.

I have seen this in many of the people I work with day to day on leaving addiction behind, who find themselves pushed towards drug-based solutions despite an inner disagreement.

I faced the same dilemma myself years ago. After an epileptic seizure, and following an EEG, I was strongly advised to take medication for life. But knowing it was my first seizure and that the context had a lot to do with it — a complicated, very stressful period — I turned down the dependence on offer, though not without some doubt in the face of authority.

Did I do the right thing? I am convinced I did. All the more so given that the doctor in question never took the time to ask me about that context. And I have never had another seizure since.

What I see regularly is that many of us have learned to set aside our own intuition and to stop trusting ourselves where our health is concerned.

Back to the aircraft, then. There are three possible pilots to consider:

• Pilot 1: the person living the addiction. You could say they are best placed to observe their own reactions (the view outside the cockpit) and their own felt sense (the instrument panel).
• Pilot 2: the one who has flown a similar aircraft for thousands of hours. Someone who has met plenty of difficulty in conditions comparable to the first pilot's — in this case, addiction.
• Pilot 3: the flight manual expert. They know the aircraft and the flight plan scientifically, conceptually and technically, but have not necessarily lived through the conditions the first two have.

I do not know about you, but I would leave the first person at the controls, because they have the most precise picture of what is happening. Starting in a simulator, of course, so as not to put themselves, the crew and the passengers at risk.

And working closely with the second — the experienced pilot — to back them up and hand over all the keys that person once needed to build confidence in their own flying.

And last, I would call on the manual expert, the technician, for specific information where needed and in case of a technical problem during the flight.

Only today, far too often, it is the technician flying while the other two are invited to sit quietly with the passengers.

That imbalance — the technician at the controls, the others as passengers — is one piece of evidence among many that our health system reflexively favours institutional, theoretical and scientific legitimacy.

Almost certainly a legacy of our schooling, where we learned to sit still and listen to our teachers with very little room for exchange or experiment. An environment in which knowing how to be and knowing how to do were largely pushed aside in favour of knowing in theory.

Which is why the first step towards freedom is taking back the controls and recognising that you are the best pilot of your own life, because you know it better than anyone. You live with yourself twenty-four hours a day, while a doctor or a therapist spends at most an hour or two a week with you.

To be clear, the point is not to dismiss the technical expertise in the manual, nor to reject any help that could be useful to you, medical help included. The point is to invite you to take control of your instrument panel — what you feel, what you think, your emotions, your intuition — and to develop the discernment to choose your co-pilots well. The good news, incidentally, is that lived experience remains popular and inspiring with readers. By far the best-loved books on addiction are personal accounts:

• Allen Carr, The Easy Way to Stop Smoking
• Olivier Ameisen, The End of My Addiction
• Catherine Gray, The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober

Einstein said there is only one way to convince: by setting an example. There is no other. With the quiet hope that this work might one day join those sources of inspiration by example.