Chemistry of Addiction
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Insecure Attachment Part of the aetiology of Addictive Behaviour?
I have always asked myself if other recovering alcoholics have the same insecure attachment issues as me – can I really extrapolate my straw poll of alcoholics in recovery, whom I know to have insecure attachment issues, to the whole recovery movement? And if other alcoholics do suffer from […]
OCD – A Behavioural Addiction?
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is primarily conceived as an anxiety disorder but has features resembling addictive behavior. Patients with OCD may develop dependency upon compulsive behaviors because of the rewarding effects following reduction of obsession-induced anxiety. Reward processing is critically dependent on ventral striatal-orbitofrontal circuitry and brain imaging studies […]
COMMUNITY NARRATIVES AND PERSONAL STORIES IN ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
COMMUNITY NARRATIVES AND PERSONAL STORIES IN ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS Other stories they share in AA. – following on from our first blog on this subject, this excellent academic article considered the transformative power of the story format with AA recovery. Part 2 “This study is an empirical response to recent calls for […]
Internet Gaming Disorder?
Getting beatin at the fight with addiction sucks! The American Psychiatric Association decided that enough evidence exists to include video game addiction as a diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as internet gaming addiction. APA suggests the effects (or symptoms) of video game addiction may […]
A Comprehensive View of Addictive Behaviour!
In this blogsite you will find a comprehensive worldview of what we believe addictive behavior to be in terms of altered neurobiology and in terms of cognitive-affective mechanisms such as stress and emotion dysregulation. You will also be shown how these models contribute to a comprehensive understanding of […]
The Distress at the Heart of Addiction – Part 3
Part 3 The overall emotion regulation network contains the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) ventromedial prefrontal (VM PFC) regions including the anterior cingulate cortex, amygdala and the striatum as well as the insular cortex and the hippocampus. Studies show increased activity in motor areas of the brain during emotional processing (), suggest […]
This Emotional Disease?
Part 2 A Brief History of Addiction as Affective Disorder Cheetham and others are not the first, however, to suggest an affect centred view of addiction. Rado in 1933, described substance use as a way of coping with excessively difficult states of emotions (3). Others have interpreted addiction […]
A Disorder of Stress-Emotion Dysregulation?
Part 1 In our previous neurobiological model, we highlighted how the addiction cycle may be viewed as a transition towards increasingly chronic stress and emotional dysregulation, with persistent states of emotional distress, at the endpoint of addiction, ultimately acting as a stimulus response to the activation of compulsive […]
Diagnosis: Towards Validity and Consistency
Translating Accurate Diagnosis into Effective Treatment, Part Two The way addicts and alcoholics themselves talk about their condition (“an emotional disease,” “a parasite the feeds on our emotions”, “an emotional cancer,” “a fear based disease”) is rarely considered in theories of addiction. Within the frame of the current […]
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