Carl Erik Fisher, MD is an addiction psychiatrist, bioethics scholar, person in recovery, and author of the 2022 book The Urge: Our History of Addiction. He is an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, where he works on law, ethics, and policy relating to psychiatry and neuroscience.
Carl- Speaking of rat park, I imagine you've heard/read Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari. Have any thoughts about the book? It was my 'introduction' to addiction.
Oh so much there, re: addiction and policy. I am grateful to Johann for raising the profile of this important issue and for giving space to theories and ideas that don't get enough airtime. But for Bruce Alexander's work, his own book The Globalization of Addiction is very readable and rich and stands well on its own. I highly recommend that as well.
It depends on how constructivist we want to be about it, I suppose. In my book, I try to unpack this issue of psychohistory and walk a middle ground that (1) acknowledges addiction as real, in the sense that it appears to be a timeless phenomenon that has a significant impact on people's lives, while also (2) respecting that a particular definition of addiction only makes sense within a particular cultural framing. In particular it is not a neat, 1=1 equivalence between historical eras.
This is a big topic. I think one cogent and reasonable view is proposed by the sociologist and public health expert Robin Room. Here is a good article of his that is not paywalled: https://www.robinroom.net/cultfram.pdf I highly recommend his work
Carl- Speaking of rat park, I imagine you've heard/read Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari. Have any thoughts about the book? It was my 'introduction' to addiction.
Oh so much there, re: addiction and policy. I am grateful to Johann for raising the profile of this important issue and for giving space to theories and ideas that don't get enough airtime. But for Bruce Alexander's work, his own book The Globalization of Addiction is very readable and rich and stands well on its own. I highly recommend that as well.
I'll let Carl know about your comment so he can respond!
Or anyone for that matter. I just realized this post is over a week old.
I don't understand why Carl says that we can't equate "habitual drunkenness" with addiction.
It depends on how constructivist we want to be about it, I suppose. In my book, I try to unpack this issue of psychohistory and walk a middle ground that (1) acknowledges addiction as real, in the sense that it appears to be a timeless phenomenon that has a significant impact on people's lives, while also (2) respecting that a particular definition of addiction only makes sense within a particular cultural framing. In particular it is not a neat, 1=1 equivalence between historical eras.
This is a big topic. I think one cogent and reasonable view is proposed by the sociologist and public health expert Robin Room. Here is a good article of his that is not paywalled: https://www.robinroom.net/cultfram.pdf I highly recommend his work