Not a Disease

Rethinking Addiction in the Heart of America's Overdose Crisis

Inbunden, Engelska, 2027

459 kr

Kommande

A bracing—and compassionate—challenge to the idea of addiction as a disease. From a leading psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine and the medical director of a methadone clinic in Washington, DC.Ask someone why they got a brain tumor. They won’t know. But ask someone why they developed an addiction and they’ll have a personal, meaningful explanation. Why? Because, Sally Satel argues, unlike a brain tumor, addiction is not a disease, and, in particular, not a brain disease. Dismantling the conventional framing of addiction, Not a Disease makes a compelling case for more refined—and useful—conceptual and clinical perspectives. Addiction, Satel suggests, is better understood as a symptom rather than a disease—a symptom of psychic pain that needs to be anesthetized. Only by recognizing this will we find a more effective approach to recovery.A practicing physician who has worked with addicts for many years, Satel explores why people consume substances to excess, and why conflicting ideas—held by physicians, scientists, policymakers, and the public—complicate treatment and policy. Without dismissing biological factors, she looks at the drug epidemic in Ironton, Ohio, a small American town in decline, breaking down the conventional wisdom that ascribes too much power to the capacity of drugs to enslave users’ brains, and too little to the vulnerabilities of people and places that draw them to drugs in the first place. Her analysis of the misguided responses to the crisis of addiction to prescription opioids illuminates the plight of millions of patients plunged into needless and solitary agony.Boldly recasting the nature of addiction, from painkillers to fentanyl, Not a Disease holds out hope for a more humane way to meet this deep and widespread societal challenge.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2027-01-05
Mått152 x 229 x undefined mm
Vikt567 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor296
FörlagMIT Press Ltd
ISBN9780262058032

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Missbruk inom Medicin

Sally Satel, MD, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the medical director of a methadone clinic in Washington, DC. She is a lecturer at the Yale School of Medicine and the author of numerous books, including her most recent, Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience, with Scott Lilienfeld, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science.

ENDORSEMENTS“The topic of addiction is vexing, complicated, highly important, and riveting. Even if some passages make a scientist like me squirm, Sally Satel’s point of view is useful, significant, and very much worth engaging with.” —Steven E. Hyman, Director, Program in Brain Health, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard“This thought-provoking, often counterintuitive book proposes that addiction is the result of social and psychic decay rather than a biological disease. Mixing compelling anecdotes and peer-reviewed studies, Satel proposes that those who live desperate lives will turn to self-destruction to mitigate their pain, and that the disease model of addiction, though formulated with compassion, undermines self-determination: that its aura of forgiveness cloaks a fearful disenfranchisement.” —Andrew Solomon, author of Far From the Tree and The Noonday Demon“A fascinating, bracing, and humane reexamination of the opioid epidemic, and of the prevailing medical model of addiction. Satel writes with the authority of a psychiatrist who is not just deeply familiar with the scientific literature and with the history of drug policy and pain management but who also, more importantly, has worked for years with substance abusers, including at a methadone clinic in opioid-devastated Appalachia. This book will challenge your preconceptions about addiction—and it ought to provoke national debate about how we as a society manage it.” —Scott Stossel, National Editor, The Atlantic; author of the international bestseller My Age of Anxiety“Nobody writes better than Sally Satel about the real and imaginary disorders that afflict the mind, and the public policies that compound our misconceptions in ways that harm the very people they are intended to help. In Not a Disease, she examines myths about addiction and recovery with the empirical mind of a scientist, the compassion of a practitioner, and the clarifying art of a writer.”— Jonathan Rosen, author of The Best Minds