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The urge : our history of addiction

Fisher, Carl Erik2022

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Summary

An authoritative, illuminating, and deeply humane history of addiction a phenomenon that remains baffling and deeply misunderstood despite having touched countless lives by an addiction psychiatrist striving to understand his own family and himself. Even after a decades-long opioid overdose crisis, intense controversy still rages over the fundamental nature of addiction and the best way to treat it. With uncommon empathy and erudition, Carl Erik Fisher draws on his own experience as a clinician, researcher, and alcoholic in recovery as he traces the history of a phenomenon that, centuries on, we hardly appear closer to understanding, let alone addressing effectively. As a psychiatrist-in-training fresh from medical school, Fisher was soon face-to-face with his own addiction crisis, one that nearly cost him everything. Desperate to make sense of the condition that had plagued his family for generations, he turned to the history of addiction, learning that the current quagmire is only the latest iteration of a centuries-old story: humans have struggled to define, treat, and control addictive behaviour for most of recorded history, including well before the advent of modern science and medicine.