Psychiatrist Sally Satel and psychologist Scott O. Lilienfeld offer hope to those struggling to overcome a dependence on drugs:
[I]t turns out that quitting is the rule, not the exception—a fact worth acknowledging, given that the official NIDA [National Institute on Drug Abuse] formulation is that “addiction is a chronic and relapsing [italics added] brain disease.” The Epidemiologic Catchment Area Study, done in the early 1980s, surveyed 19,000 people. Among those who had become dependent on drugs by age twenty-four, more than half later reported not a single drug-related symptom. By age thirty-seven, roughly 75 percent reported no drug symptom. The National Comorbidity Survey, conducted between 1990 and 1992 and again between 2001 and 2003, and the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions, conducted between 2001 and 2002 with more than 43,000 subjects, found that 77 and 86 percent of people who said they had once been addicted to drugs or alcohol reported no substance problems during the year before the survey.1
Satel and Lilienfeld challenge the conventional view of addiction as a ‘brain disease’ in their 2013 book, Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience.
