A thought-provoking, industry-minded, and polarizing perspective on the neurocircuitry of human desire and compulsion.
An argument against classifying addiction as a chronic “brain disease.”
Armed with scientific data and plenty of case studies, developmental neuroscientist and former addict Lewis (Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines His Former Life on Drugs, 2012) enters the ongoing addiction nomenclature debate with an intellectually authoritative yet controversial declaration that substance and behavioral dependencies are swiftly and deeply learned via the “neural circuitry of desire.” The author blames the medical community for developing a disease-model juggernaut derived primarily from clinical data rather than biological and psychological research on brain changes and altered synapses. Lewis believes this conceptualization pegged the affliction as a disease instead of what he deems a “developmental cascade and a detrimental result of habitual behaviors.” As increasing numbers of medical communities have embraced the addiction model this way, he writes, treatment methodologies often become ineffective as well. Lewis further criticizes the Alcoholics Anonymous strategy and its emphasis on an addict’s ability to surrender to their “powerlessness” over a compulsion rather than promoting personal empowerment toward self-sustainability. Once past a somewhat overly clinical neuroscientific discussion on the brain’s plasticity, Lewis introduces biographical testimonies of Americans struggling with addiction that both humanize and reinforce his standpoint. Awash in the separate throes of heroin, methamphetamine, opiates, alcohol, and binge-eating compulsions, the cases are complemented with uplifting updates on their sobriety efforts, which the author prefers to call a “developmental journey” toward recovery. Lewis’ statement that addiction is “uncannily normal” likely stems from his experiences as a former narcotic addict who overcame a decadelong drug habit at age 30. While definite fodder for debate, the author remains firm in his belief that in order to fully process the addiction spectrum, we must “gaze directly at the point where experience and biology meet.”
A thought-provoking, industry-minded, and polarizing perspective on the neurocircuitry of human desire and compulsion.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61039-437-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
A fascinating chapter in earliest American history, and an example of how far-reaching the ramifications of federal law can...
A gripping account of the discovery and subsequent controversy that surrounded Kennewick Man, a 9,500-year-old skeleton found in the Pacific Northwest.
Anthropologist and forensic consultant Chatters was minding the shop in 1996 when the Benton County coroner came calling with a skull discovered in the nearby Columbia River in Washington state. Although the formation of the jaw and brow suggested to Chatters that the skull was that of a Caucasian (perhaps an early settler in the region who died a century ago), there was a puzzle in the form of an arrowhead (a projectile of a type that’s been out of use for many thousands of years) lodged in the skeleton’s pelvis. Radiocarbon dating revealed the astounding age of the bones; Kennewick Man was one of the most complete skeletons ever discovered from such a remote period. However, his age put him square in the middle of a controversy. Was Kennewick Man, a Caucasoid skeleton not traceable to any existing tribe, subject to the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act? If so, he would have to be reburied immediately, with no further scientific examinations. As Chatters relates the case, it is a striking example of how bureaucracy can be manipulated—in this case, by the Army Corps of Engineers and the local tribes who seized and held the skeleton, exhausting deadline after deadline for performing its own studies. After four years of delay, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit found for the tribes, at which point Chatters and eight other scientists sued for the right to examine the skeleton (this “ancient American fossil that even the government’s own experts admit needs to be studied”) before its reburial. Chatters, with true scientific curiosity, then moves into headier subject matter, advancing theories of how Kennewick Man came to be in the Americas, what his society might have been like, and what the projectile in his pelvis might suggest about human conflict in a remote age often painted as idyllic.
A fascinating chapter in earliest American history, and an example of how far-reaching the ramifications of federal law can be.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-85936-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
An intriguing, if only partly successful, effort to apply Buddhist insights, particularly from meditation, to patient- therapist dynamics. A New Yorkbased psychiatrist and consulting editor to the Buddhist review Tricycle, Epstein does a good job of explaining the six Buddhist stages of existence and four essential truths. At times he draws parallels between such Buddhist concepts as ``bare attention'' (``an approach to working with our own minds and emotions [that] is impartial, open, nonjudgmental, interested, patient, fearless and impersonal'') and the Freudian charge to the therapist to listen to a patient with ``evenly suspended attention.'' Epstein's efforts to apply Buddhist masters' and his own insights from meditation to therapy are at times fascinating, at times quite elusive—the latter perhaps in part because the Buddhist concept that ``self'' is an illusion is so distant from Western philosophy and sensibilities; in part because prolonged and disciplined meditation at its most profound is a quasi-mystical phenomenon that is best experienced firsthand before being analyzed. Epstein, of course, has had this experience, but many of his readers will not have. Still, the author makes an eloquent and persuasive case that serious meditation is usually best used not as a substitute but as a complement to and preparation for psychotherapy; it can strengthen psychological preparedness by helping the ego observe itself. As a longtime student of Buddhism and meditator, and as an experienced therapist, Epstein offers an accessible, thoughtful guide to how the insights of one can be adapted to the other. No facile synthesis of the two systems here, but rather a thoughtful account that allows their paths to converge and diverge without losing sight of the distinctive contributions of each to deeper self-understanding.
Pub Date: April 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-465-03931-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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