tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-142743152971096915.post3760338380434819958..comments2023-10-05T04:44:25.174-05:00Comments on Addiction Inbox: Treating Addictions [Guest Post]Dirk Hansonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07429793255785560043noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-142743152971096915.post-61971287222482901802010-01-03T18:09:24.226-06:002010-01-03T18:09:24.226-06:00I had hoped that someone else would comment on thi...I had hoped that someone else would comment on this post so I wouldn't have to.<br /><br />I'm taken aback that Ms. White failed to notice the glaring contradiction in this post. She begins by exonerating addicts for their behavioral failures, attributing them instead to the phenomena of tolerance and withdrawal. Two paragraphs later, she refers to relapse as a "sorry" and "decadent" state, and asserts that addicts who don't relapse are simply "made of sterner stuff." I'm a neuropharmacologist and a scientist and thus am disinclined to feel emotion, but this particular hypocrisy really disgusts me.<br /><br />Relapse frequently occurs because popular treatment paradigms fail to address a basic pathology of the addict: devaluation and temporal discounting. Not only do drugs of addiction become less pleasant with repeated administration, they also decrease the value of virtually all other pleasurable activities, and shorten the addict's temporal horizon. Thus, the shorter the latency to pleasure, the more strongly preferred by the addict. If such disordered decision-making is not addressed in treatment, upon re-entering the real world the addict is still quite likely to prefer drug to the vague and uncertain reward of remaining sober.<br /><br />I could easily spend an hour on this comment, but I only lecture when contractually obliged to do so; instead, I simply urge Ms. White to do more research before publishing any more articles on addiction. Gene Heyman's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Addiction-Disorder-Gene-M-Heyman/dp/0674032985" rel="nofollow"><i>Addiction: A Disorder of Choice</i></a> is an excellent place to start.<br /><br />[Dirk, your intro is no less baffling. Immersion in hard science and medicine is preferable to watered-down accounts that appear to be based on copy-friendly SciAm sound bytes. The author's failure to stick to the main premise of her own argument renders this post meaningless at best, and at worst, misleading. I hope no one reading this post took the title seriously.]gloriousdayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15395812143042602605noreply@blogger.com