Reddit reviews The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease
We found 10 Reddit comments about The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
PublicAffairs
This passage really spoke to me. It's from The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease by Marc David Lewis. Has anyone heard of the book or read it?
Sidebar! Otherwise, I met Mark Lewis in October at the MN Nobel Peace Conference on Addiction.
There's a couple of books such as:
The Biology of Desire (Lewis), Memoirs of an Addicted Brain (Lewis), In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts (Mate)
This was great to read. Congrats, and thank you.
A great book by a neurologist and former addict that challenges the "disease" and "willpower" models is "The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease" - http://www.amazon.com/The-Biology-Desire-Addiction-Disease/dp/1610394372. Supported my gut beliefs ab addiction (warning: it's very heavy on the neurology but necessarily so) and gave me the courage to start sobriety.
>är det inte lite så att vi borde titta på en mer generell lösning på missbruk?
För detta krävs ju att man faktiskt intresserar sig för främmande perspektiv.
T.ex.:
>Well, when it arrives let me know.
http://nypost.com/2015/07/12/addiction-is-not-a-disease-and-were-treating-drug-and-alcohol-addicts-wrong/
http://www.amazon.com/The-Biology-Desire-Addiction-Disease/dp/1610394372
Here's the thing: I think your psychological pain re: addiction (your feeling of being "cursed") is due to the fact that you hold irrational beliefs about addiction.
>"It is not events that disturb people, but it is their judgments concerning them."
>
>- Epictetus
I am trying to support you by disputing those irrational beliefs.
You don't have a curse. It's unreasonable to think that you do. You can stop worrying about this.
You don't have an addictive personality:
>"Fundamentally, the idea of a general addictive personality is a myth." (Scientific American)
You do not have a problem that can make you do things against your will. Addiction is a real psychological problem, but it's not a disease and it can't make you drink/gamble/smoke/do drugs when you don't want to. You are in control of your own body.
If you embrace these new beliefs, you could have a better life. Change your beliefs, and you can seize control of your addiction. Keep believing what you believe right now, and your addiction controls you.
Sorry if I came off as too argumentative. This is the advice that gave me power over my addiction, so I'm sharing it with you.
EDIT: Another one of your irrational beliefs about addiction is that it's a "coping mechanism." I made a post about this a few days ago.
OK, then maybe you should read this book that challenges the medical model: https://www.amazon.com/Biology-Desire-Why-Addiction-Disease/dp/1610394372
The medical model has useful aspects. For example, yes, prevents precisely that sort of problem when addicts are just blamed and not helped. And it really helps with insurance.
The problem is, it is not entirely true, there is no clear difference between addiction and just liking something a lot.
My biggest takeaway from the book was that any addiction, regardless of the source, can also be nonchemical (gambling) rewires the brain to generally seek short-term pleasures, even about other stuff, and ignores the long term i.e. creates high time preferences. This really shot my idea that we should just create a healthy designer drug. Anything that feels too good too easily is addiction, and any addiction reduces, basically, patience in all other fields of life as well because the brain focuses on short term, not long term rewards.
>Also not applicable, ammo manufacturers didn't falsely market
Purdue didn't falsely market it, their statements were accurate as long as you DID NOT crush and snort the pills.
http://www.asam.org/docs/default-source/advocacy/opioid-addiction-disease-facts-figures.pdf
From American Society of Addiction Medicine, 80% of those hooked on opioids used them off script and then got addicted to them. So again, personal responsibility.
>I mean their business practices, not their taxes. Also, they misreported to the FDA.
Again, they didn't misreport, they just didn't report about the possible side affects of someone misusing the drug. If you didn't snort it, you had a very low chance of being addicted.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/health/purdue-opioids-oxycontin.html
The entire article is about how addictive the drug was, but mentions it was when crushed and snorted.
>Most civil cases don't have a jury, and any litigation of that monetary value would go up to appeals court or higher before one side settled. Class actions even more so. That's bullshit.
Right, they declared bankruptcy to minimize financial loss, it's a smart move. The parties get to decide if it is a jury trial.
>This is objectively wrong under modern medicine's understanding of addiction. It isn't a choice, it's a disease, and the majority of people cannot possibly stop using it on their own. In many cases, trying to do that is more dangerous than an OD because of withdrawal.
Funny, are you sure about that? Because there is a lot of push back going on over the claim that addiction is a disease.
>Addiction does not meet the criteria specified for a core disease entity, namely the presence of a primary measurable deviation from physiologic or anatomical norm.2 Addiction is self-acquired and is not transmissible, contagious, autoimmune, hereditary, degenerative or traumatic. Treatment consists of little more than stopping a given behaviour. True diseases worsen if left untreated. A patient with cancer is not cured if locked in a cell, whereas an alcoholic is automatically cured. No access to alcohol means no alcoholism. A person with schizophrenia will not remit if secluded. Sepsis will spread and Parkinson disease will worsen if left untreated. Criminal courts do not hand down verdicts of “not guilty by virtue of mental illness” to drunk drivers who kill pedestrians.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3314045/
Here is a neuroscience disputing it is a disease.
https://www.amazon.com/The-Biology-Desire-Addiction-Disease/dp/1610394372
I am not defending Purdue, I'm outraged that we aren't blaming the addicts, the addicts are 100% at fault and those that died did so because they had a moral failing that they were unwilling to correct.
This is just a money grab like the cigarettes. The only winners were the lawyers.
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/great-tobacco-robbery-lawyers-grab-billions
If that link is too right wing for you, here is the NY Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/12/us/lawyers-in-early-tobacco-suits-to-get-8-billion.html
So again my point is that little of this suit is going to help addicts, but the lawyers were make out like bandits by by vilifying a vital, but often abused industry. The pain I have had in my surgeries were horrendous and without pain meds I wouldn't have probably put up with half of them. The next time I have surgery, I'll likely have a much lower dosage and suffer more than needed because everyone will be worried about suits.
So like I said in the post, I have drastically changed my behavior in regards to alcohol and the structure of my entire social life. I stopped hanging out with the group of friends I had that enabled the behavior that led to my DUI completely. I stopped going to parties and bars completely. And I stopped making friends that enjoy or glorify those kinds of things. I used to be a very social and outgoing person but have since transformed into somebody very different, and in my opinion it's for the better.
>There, no more excuses to not go to a meeting. Do meetings work for everyone? No. Absolutely not. Do they work for very many? Yes. Try it.
As per court order I went to meetings for an entire year. I've been to countless 12 step meetings. I started to go to a pragmatic alternative to a 12-step-program where somebody gave me this book and that's what made me stop going. Addiction isn't a disease and problems with substances don't make somebody an addict for life. Here's a good video. Changing your behavior and your settings do much better than sitting in a room with strangers chanting falsehoods about your identity.
I'm sorry if it works for you but it just doesn't do anything for me, and in fact I think it's harmful, and there's alternatives to the 12 step way of thinking - especially for people that are not alcoholics.
Every meeting I went to was the same thing - a person would open with a topic for the day and the rest of the time was spent by people sharing their woe is me stories that never had anything to do with the topic. Nobody was listening and everybody just wanted some time in the spotlight to share their "success" stories. It's a placebo that temporarily works for a lot of people but it just didn't add anything to my life.
In addition, it seems like in the United States at least, anybody who is critical of the 12-step-programs, or just doesn't get anything out of them, is outcast, dismissed, and written off as "in denial". It's either make your DUI an integral part of your identity or fuck off. It's an outdated system and it's unfortunate it permeates our government and culture, given its evangelical origins and very low success rate.
There's plenty of legit criticism of 12 step programs. They are cult-like, they erect barriers, the success rate is extremely low, and they force you to internalize something extremely negative as a defining part of your identity - when the science is in conflict with that idea.
Back to the topic at hand. This is exactly what I'm scared of seeking treatment for ADHD. I'm scared my psychiatrist is going to write me off as, as you put it, "isn't even out of denial enough", and instead of talking to me like a person is just going to say, as you put it, "just go to a meeting" because "I still have lots of work to do" before I'm taken seriously.
I mean, Jesus, are there alternative treatments of ADHD that aren't abusable drugs? At this point I'd rather just take that route if I'm going to have to spend hundreds of dollars to be told I'm an addict in denial who just needs more 12-step-meetings.
There's a counter-theory that suggests that treating addition as a disease is both biologically incorrect and an impediment to recovery.
If you're interested, here's a a short article on Salon about the theory, which is fully developed in the book [The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease](
https://www.amazon.com/The-Biology-Desire-Addiction-Disease/dp/1610394372) by Marc Lewis.
Helped me think differently about addiction, for sure.
But you're absolutely right that the road to recovery is difficult without support for anyone.