ArticleCulture, medicine and psychiatry2012
The experience of addiction as told by the addicted: incorporating biological understandings into self-story.
Article in Culture, medicine and psychiatry, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- This is my way of Drinking: A Scoping Review of how Individuals Narrate Their Alcohol-Related Problems.Nordisk alkohol- & narkotikatidskrift : NAT · 2026Review
- Skills and Resources of Psychiatric Mental Health Nurses to Support a Long and Uncertain Recovery Journey: A Grounded Theory Approach.Journal of psychiatric and mental health nursing · 2026Article
- Article
- Addicted to socialising and still lonely: A comparative, corpus-driven analysis of problematic social networking site use.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2024Article
- The utility of a latent-cause framework for understanding addiction phenomena.Addiction neuroscience · 2024Article
- Narrative medicine and humanities for health professions education: an experimental study.Medical education online · 2023Article
- 'Let Others Love You Back to Health': The Role of Performance-based Support Groups for People in Recovery.Community mental health journal · 2023Article
- Self-interpellation in narratives about craving: Multiple and unitary selves.Sociology of health & illness · 2022Article
- Negotiating SHI-FEI and shifei: Pursuing a Moralist Self in China's Community-Based Addiction Treatment Programs.Culture, medicine and psychiatry · 2022Article
- The Patient Lived-Experience of Ventral Capsulotomy for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis of Neuroablative Psychiatric Neurosurgery.Frontiers in integrative neuroscience · 2022Article
- Health(care) in the Crisis: Reflections in Science and Society on Opioid Addiction.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Review
- "Chasing the first high": memory sampling in drug choice.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2020Review
- "Why did I get that part of you?" Understanding addiction genetics through family history.Public understanding of science (Bristol, England) · 2019Article
- "I don't have to know why it snows, I just have to shovel it!": Addiction Recovery, Genetic Frameworks, and Biological Citizenship.BioSocieties · 2017Article
- Alcohol and culture: An introduction.Nordisk alkohol- & narkotikatidskrift : NAT · 2017Article
- Q: Is Addiction a Brain Disease or a Moral Failing? A: Neither.Neuroethics · 2017Article
- Article
- An Ethical Exploration of Barriers to Research on Controlled Drugs.The American journal of bioethics : AJOB · 2016Article
- Addiction: Current Criticism of the Brain Disease Paradigm.AJOB neuroscience · 2013Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
How do the addicted view addiction against the framework of formal theories that attempt to explain the condition? In this empirical paper, we report on the lived experience of addiction based on 63 semi-structured, open-ended interviews with individuals in treatment for alcohol and nicotine abuse at five sites in Minnesota. Using qualitative analysis, we identified four themes that provide insights into understanding how people who are addicted view their addiction, with particular emphasis on the biological model. More than half of our sample articulated a biological understanding of addiction as a disease. Themes did not cluster by addictive substance used; however, biological understandings of addiction did cluster by treatment center. Biological understandings have the potential to become dominant narratives of addiction in the current era. Though the desire for a "unified theory" of addiction seems curiously seductive to scholars, it lacks utility. Conceptual "disarray" may actually reflect a more accurate representation of the illness as told by those who live with it. For practitioners in the field of addiction, we suggest the practice of narrative medicine with its ethic of negative capability as a useful approach for interpreting and relating to diverse experiences of disease and illness.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.