TREATABLE

Addiction has long been considered an illness without a cure. Worse, some have regarded addiction not as a disease at all, but as a moral failing. While progress has been made in our understanding of addiction - its genetic inheritance, its neurobiology, its link to trauma - our perspective on interventions, treatment, and outcomes has barely moved on.

Now, in Treatable, leading addiction expert Dr Sarah Wakeman challenges us to consider: what if we’ve had it all wrong? What if people with substance use disorder are not weak or hopeless or doomed? What if notions like allowing them to hit “rock bottom” or issuing hard ultimatums or sending them to “rehab” were, in fact, making them sicker instead of helping them get well? And what if much of the addiction treatment system - the very body empowered to help people with addiction - was frequently so rife with bias, fraud, and non evidence-based models of care that, actually, very few people seeking care receive the help they need?