Maia Szalavitz || Rethinking Addiction

The Psychology Podcast

iHeartPodcasts

Social Sciences, Science

4.4 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 6 September 2017

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week we're glad to welcome Maia Szalavitz to the podcast! Maia Szalavitz is one of the premier American journalists covering addiction and drugs. She is a co-author of Born for Love and The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, as well as a writer for TIME.com, VICE, the New York Times, Scientific American Mind, Elle, Psychology Today and Marie Claire among others. Her latest book is Unbroken Brain, which challenges the idea of the addict's "broken brain" and the simplistic notion of an "addictive personality". The key themes of our conversation include: The personal nature of her book and how emergent science has helped her understand her past Where the brain is and isn't to blame in the rise of addiction in individuals "Addiction is not a sin or a choice. It's also not a chronic brain disease." Why many addictive behaviors are adaptive, and the distinction between an "addiction" and a "dependence" "Traits that we think are useless can be useful in some settings." Why she advocates for a shift from belief-cased addiction treatment (ex. 12-step program) to evidence-based treatment "We all learn to become who we are." We end the conversation with a discussion of what this means to Maia and how we can all benefit from reflecting on this idea in different facets of our lives. Maia offers a paradigm-shifting take on thinking about addiction, and we think you will learn a lot from this episode. Enjoy! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/the-psychology-podcast/support

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the psychology podcast with Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman where we give
0:04.7	you insights into the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity. Each episode will feature a
0:09.5	new guest who will stimulate your mind and give you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
0:14.0	we live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into human possibility. Thanks for listening and
0:19.0	enjoy the podcast. I'm really excited to have Maya Solvitz on the show today.
0:46.2	Mya is one of the premier American journalists covering addiction and drugs. Her work often appears in Time.com, The New York Times, Scientific American, Ella,
0:51.9	Vice, and New York magazine.
0:54.0	She's a 2015-2016 Soros Justice Fellow and has received major awards for her coverage of
0:59.8	neuroscience and addiction from the American Psychological Association, the Drug Policy Alliance, and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology.
1:07.4	Her latest book is Unbroken Brain, a revolutionary new way of understanding addiction.
1:13.3	Thanks for chatting with me today, Maya.
1:15.4	Sure, thanks so much for having me.
1:17.3	I'd want you to chat with you for a long time
1:18.9	about this topic and this book.
1:20.9	I appreciate it.
1:22.3	Now, this book was very personal, heavily scientifically
1:26.4	researched. Is there a part of you that wishes you, when you were in the
1:30.2	thick of this, had done that scientific research and had that knowledge then?
1:34.0	Well, I mean, yeah, it certainly would have been better if I had known early on what I was facing.
1:41.0	But, you know, also, to be be frank the knowledge has changed. The way we saw
1:46.4	addiction in the 80s is thankfully somewhat different to the way we see it today
1:51.5	although we're still struggling with the ideas
	...

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