Last weekend I had the real privilege of attending a training seminar on the Neuroscience of Addiction by Dr. Carlton Erickson. He’s the director of the Addiction Science Research and Education Center at the University of Texas. He’s a brilliant man and a great teacher - not often you get that combo in my experience. His research shows that all addiction (which is now called dependency) to be a form of OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) that results from a miswired, or dysregulated, brain. He believes that in a few years, instead of receiving a diagnosis of alcoholism, those affected will receive a diagnosis of OCD characterized by alcoholism. In other words, alcoholism is the symptom of the disease, or the dysregulated brain, not the disease itself. Dr. Erickson says that most of us can’t become alcoholics because we simply don’t have the brain dysregulation needed to create it. Or, even if we have a dysregulated brain, it might not be dysregulated in the way that causes alcoholism. Instead, ours might be of the obsessive hand washing variety or the not stepping on cracks type or the type that goes into rages without a trigger.

August 7, 2007

News Summary

The Recognizing Addiction as a Disease Act of 2007, sponsored by Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), seeks