Free Help for Late Cancer, Early Diabetes, Addiction

Addiction 1

Doug Dix, Ph.D,

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 7:49

All addictions are about getting high, and all highs involve dopamine in the brain's reward center. So therapy for addiction should be similar, if not identical, for all forms of addiction. There's lots of talk about addiction being a brain disease, but not much data to support the notion. Much more data supports psychosocial factors as causal. Contingency Management is based on the observation that our actions are dictated by the reward we derive from them. If we make a reward contingent upon an addict doing or not doing a particular action, we help the addict break the addiction. And the larger the reward and the faster it is given relative to the desired action, the more effective it is at breaking the addiction. Whether by cold turkey or tapering at a tolerable pace, abstinence is the goal.