ReviewFrontiers in psychiatry2013
Addiction and the brain-disease fallacy.
Review in Frontiers in psychiatry, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 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
22 citing papers in PubMed, 137 citations in OpenAlex.
- Relearning the epistemology, history, and future of neuropsychiatry.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Review
- "They're not mentally ill, their lives are just shit": Stakeholders' understanding of deaths of despair in a deindustrialised community in North East England.Health & place · 2024Article
- Addicted to socialising and still lonely: A comparative, corpus-driven analysis of problematic social networking site use.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2024Article
- What isn't public health?Journal of public health policy · 2023Review
- Alcohol use disorder and disability insurance in Switzerland: the attitudes and views of lawyers, insurance medical experts, and addiction-specialist therapists.Substance abuse treatment, prevention, and policy · 2022Article
- Neuropsychiatric Model of Addiction Simplified.The Psychiatric clinics of North America · 2022Review
- Is addiction a brain disease? A plea for agnosticism and heterogeneity.Psychopharmacology · 2022Review
- Does Addiction Have A Subject?: Desire in Contemporary U.S. Culture.The Journal of medical humanities · 2021Article
- An Answer to "So What?" Implications of Network Theory for Research and Practice.Focus (American Psychiatric Publishing) · 2021Article
- Embodying addiction: A predictive processing account.Brain and cognition · 2020Article
- Re-wiring Guilt: How Advancing Neuroscience Encourages Strategic Interventions Over Retributive Justice.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Review
- Testing the Constraint Theory of Addiction: Cannabis Constraints Discriminate Users from Nonusers and Heavy from Light Users.Journal of addiction · 2020Article
- Substance Use Research with Indigenous Communities: Exploring and Extending Foundational Principles of Community Psychology.American journal of community psychology · 2019Article
- Relapse to opioid seeking in rat models: behavior, pharmacology and circuits.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2019Review
- Ten myths about work addiction.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2018Review
- Factors Associated with Sustained Remission among Chronic Opioid Users.Addiction & health · 2018Article
- Drug Addiction: From Neuroscience to Ethics.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2018Article
- Minding the brain: the role of pharmacotherapy in substance-use disorder treatment.Dialogues in clinical neuroscience · 2017Review
- Q: Is Addiction a Brain Disease or a Moral Failing? A: Neither.Neuroethics · 2017Article
- The relationship between study addiction and work addiction: A cross-cultural longitudinal study.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
From Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience by Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld, copyright © 2013. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. The notion that addiction is a "brain disease" has become widespread and rarely challenged. The brain-disease model implies erroneously that the brain is necessarily the most important and useful level of analysis for understanding and treating addiction. This paper will explain the limits of over-medicalizing - while acknowledging a legitimate place for medication in the therapeutic repertoire - and why a broader perspective on the problems of the addicted person is essential to understanding addiction and to providing optimal care. In short, the brain-disease model obscures the dimension of choice in addiction, the capacity to respond to incentives, and also the essential fact people use drugs for reasons (as consistent with a self-medication hypothesis). The latter becomes obvious when patients become abstinent yet still struggle to assume rewarding lives in the realm of work and relationships. Thankfully, addicts can choose to recover and are not helpless victims of their own "hijacked brains."
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.