Wray Herbert summarizes the findings of a recent study showing that alcoholics who were most ashamed of their last drink were far more likely to relapse:
This is the first scientific evidence to bolster what alcoholism counselors and recovering alcoholics have long known: Shame is a core emotion underlying chronic heavy drinking. Shame is what gets people into the rooms of AA — it defines the alcoholic "bottom" — but it's a lousy motivator for staying in recovery. The power of AA is that it offers something to replace the negative emotions that most alcoholics know all too intimately.
Meanwhile, Dr. Keith Humphreys sheds light on how an addiction vaccine could offer a new avenue for addicts seeking help:
[O]nly some 3,500 physicians in the U.S. specialize full-time in addiction, as compared with a population of about 21 million Americans with diagnosable drug and alcohol problems…. The existence of a medication would legitimize cocaine and methamphetamine addiction as medical disorders, which in turn would make doctors more comfortable treating the addiction.
However, Tobias Jones questions both AA's and the medical establishment's approaches to addiction, namely that "AA’s notion that alcoholism is a disease … has meant that for decades addiction has been seen in medical terms," inviting addicts to absolve themselves of control. He characterizes the growing backlash against these conceptions:
Voices on the right of politics, such as Theodore Dalrymple and Peter Hitchens, complain that the war on drugs has never actually been fought, that we have fudged it and allowed addicts to dictate policy. Damian Thompson’s polemic, The Fix (2012), eloquently challenges the ‘disease’ analysis, saying that ‘the behaviour of addicts looks voluntary because it is’….
To my mind the great drawback of medicalising addiction is that it actually obscures AA’s subtler diagnosis of a ‘spiritual malady’. It’s not, perhaps, surprising that in our secular age the spiritual tag is touted less often than the ‘disease’ one…. Abraham Twerski, the American psychiatrist and rabbi, has worked with addicts all his life and he, too, insists on the immaterial, or metaphysical, nature of recovery. ‘I know without doubt that the source of addiction is spiritual deficiency,’ he has written. ‘Irrespective of whether we are religious or atheist, all human beings are spiritual by nature, and spirituality is the cornerstone of our recovery.’
Jones says this is consistent with his own experience running a woodland retreat for addicts:
Treatment needs to be holistic, dealing with an individual in the round. It’s not just about repairing a brain, or a vein, but about repairing relationships and the spirit.
The Dish 