Critique of the Brain Disease Model of Addiction.

About the Course:

The Office of the Surgeon General recently produced its first Report on the consequences of alcohol and drug abuse on health, making several very laudable policy recommendations, including characterizing addiction as a Brain Disease Model of Addiction (BDMA). However, the Report is marred by a biased viewpoint on the psychology and neurobiology of drug addiction. We highlight here four controversial issues that were depicted as facts in the Report, thereby potentially misleading non‐expert readers about the current state-of-the-art understanding of the psychology and neurobiology of drug addiction. It will be important to recognize a fuller range of scientific viewpoints in addiction neuroscience to avoid amplifying this bias in the coming years. The current dominant perspective on addiction as a brain disease has been challenged recently by Marc Lewis, who argued that the brain-changes related to addiction are similar to everyday changes of the brain. From this alternative perspective, addictions are bad habits that can be broken, provided that people are motivated to change. In that case, autonomous choice or free will can overcome bad influences from genes and or environments and brain-changes related to addiction. The brain changes occurring with addiction are related to choice behavior (and the related notions of willed action), habit formation and insight, hence essential mental abilities to break the addiction..

This course is based on the articles, Addiction research and theory: a commentary on the Surgeon General’s Report on alcohol, drugs, and health created by Aldo Badiani et al. in 2017, Free Will, Black Swans and Addiction created by Reinout W Wiers, PhD et al. in 2017 and Introduction: Testing and Refining Marc Lewis’s Critique of the Brain Disease Model of Addiction created by Stephen Mattews et al. in 2017.

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Recommended For:

Clinicians, physicians, administrators, researchers. This course is appropriate for intermediate levels of participants’ knowledge.

Course Objectives:

1. Acknowledge there is an opposing view to the biological disease model in the Surgeon General’s report and more current scientific data available.

2. Identify Marc Lewis and his research as the leading authority on the opposing view and the research that his book has spun off.

3. Extrapolate the two opposing models, and a third biological disorder model and apply those theories to treatment of clients/patients.