The article I reposted recently Gambling with America’s health! mentioned how certain members of Gamblers’ Anonymous saw gambling addiction, or gambling disorder, as an emotional rather than financial disease. The addicted person “wants to escape into the dream world of gambling” and “finds he or she is emotionally […]
We recently blogged on how alcoholics, and children of alcoholics, have difficulty with recognizing and differentiating external signs of emotions such as facial emotional expressions, now we will consider increasing evidence that alcoholics have difficulties with identifying and differentiating internal emotional states also. Both these areas of research point […]
There has been a lot of debate in the last thirty – forty years about genetic inheritance – with at least half of children of alcoholic families at risk for later alcoholism. What is less known is what exactly is inherited in our genes? What marks us out for later […]
Following up from our previous blog on the abnormalities in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in alcoholics, brain regions which govern emotional regulation, we came across another study which appears to show that adolescents at increased risk for later alcohol use disorders (AUDs) may also be showing an […]
Predicting relapse via extent of emotional dysregulation? by alcoholicsguide Even the most experienced counselors have difficultly spotting a recovering alcoholic in danger of relapse. Brain imaging scans might do a better job according to a study last year by researchers at Yale University. They suggested that alcoholics with […]
A constant thread throughout our blogs so far has been an assertion that alcoholism and addiction are primarily emotional regulation and processing disorders. So we were thus very interested to find this article (1) which describes how we are not the first to view alcoholism and addiction this […]
Throughout our blogs thus far, we have attempted to highlight how emotional dysregulation appears to prevalent to all aspects of alcoholism and addiction from pre-morbid vulnerability to endpoint compulsive addictive behaviours. Here we highlight a few articles which have considered how prevalent is emotional dysregulation in alcoholism and […]
Given the relative paucity of research into the processing of emotions (as opposed to recognition of emotions etc) we will have to consider how a known disorder of emotional processing Alexithymia relates to addiction. Alexythymia and Addiction Effective emotion regulation skills include the ability to be aware of emotions, identify and label […]
In this blog we are concerned in various ways with how emotional processing and regulation deficits appear at the heart of addictive behaviours such as distress based impulsivity and a decision making profile which seems to favour short term decision making over long term regardless of long term […]
Treating Addiction as an Emotional Regulation and Processing Disorder Translating accurate diagnosis into effective treatment Around this time last year and just weeks before The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (1), DSM-5, was due to appear, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), […]
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