Guest Post: Must we throw out the brain with the bathwater? Marc Lewis on addiction
Written by Anke Snoek
Macquarie University
When neuroscience started to mingle into the debate on addiction and self-control, people aimed to use these insights to cause a paradigm shift in how we judge people struggling with addictions. People with addictions are not morally despicable or weak-willed, they end up addicted because drugs influence the brain in a certain way. Anyone with a brain can become addicted, regardless their morals. The hope was that this realisation would reduce the stigma that surrounds addiction. Unfortunately, the hoped for paradigm shift didn’t really happen, because most people interpreted this message as: people with addictions have deviant brains, and this view provides a reason to stigmatise them in a different way.Read More »Guest Post: Must we throw out the brain with the bathwater? Marc Lewis on addiction