Is Addiction a Brain Disease?

Is Addiction a Brain Disease?

Where does normal brain or psychological function end, and pathology begin? The line can be hard to discern, making disease sometimes a tricky word. In addiction, normal 'wanting' processes become distorted and excessive, according to the incentive-sensitization theory. Excessive 'wanting' results from drug-induced neural sensitization changes in underlying brain mesolimbic systems of incentive...

Is Drug Addiction a Brain Disease?

How to Recover from a Brain Disease: Is Addiction a Disease, or Is there a Disease-like Stage in Addiction?

People struggling with addiction are neither powerless over their addiction, nor are they fully in control. Lewis vigorously objects to the brain disease model of addiction (BDMA), because it makes people lose belief in their self-efficacy, and hence hinders their recovery. Although he acknowledges that there is a compulsive state in addiction, he objects to the claim that this compulsion is ca...

Addiction Becomes a Brain Disease

and subcortical structures that participate both in drug Baltimore, Maryland 21224 reward and in more natural motivational phenomena. For example, Hans Breiter (Massachusetts General Hospital) showed functional magnetic resonance imaging At the end of the decade of the brain, the study of (fMRI) data implicating a generalized limbic and cortical neural mechanisms has come to dominate the study ...

Addiction is Not a Brain Disease (and it Matters)

The claim that addiction is a brain disease is almost universally accepted among scientists who work on addiction. The claim's attraction rests on two grounds: the fact that addiction seems to be characterized by dysfunction in specific neural pathways and the fact that the claim seems to the compassionate response to people who are suffering. I argue that neural dysfunction is not sufficient f...