Understanding Addiction

I seem to have become a movie critic.  A month ago I posted on Ben is Back and yesterday I watched A Beautiful Boy on a flight home from San Francisco. And what I get at the end of each movie is a big fat nothing. There is no conclusion, no understanding, no ground from […] (Read the rest.)

Yesterday I watched “Ben is Back” — a recently released feature film about a heroin-addicted young man (Lucas Hedges) and his heroic and tenacious mother (Julia Roberts) who tries her best to keep him “clean.” Ben is around 20 years old (at which age I too was also shooting heroin). He scams a trip home […] (Read the rest.)

The word “substance” may have a double-meaning when it comes to addiction. The basic meaning is obvious: the substance is a chemical that we want badly and pursue relentlessly. But the second meaning of “substance” is suggested by a well-documented phenomenon: the parallel between substance addictions and behavioural addictions. The feelings, actions, and brain changes […] (Read the rest.)

The paper I recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine (linked here, summary linked here) detailed my best arguments against the disease model of addiction. But it also explored new territory, and that’s the topic of today’s post. I emphasized (as I have for years) that addiction is learned. It is not a […] (Read the rest.)

It’s been 2 1/2 weeks since I put up that summary of Maia Szalavitz’s excellent article. Busy time since then. But now I’m in Boston, visiting my friend Matt Robert and a few others, and sitting in on SMART recovery meetings. Matt has been a SMART facilitator for over six years. I came here to […] (Read the rest.)