Text book: Inaba, D. S. & Cohen, W. E. (8th Ed.). (2014). Uppers, downers, all arounders Physical and mental effects of psychoactive drugs. Medford, OR. CNS Production Inc.
One page paper. APA format. APA format.
In your own words, describe addiction as a disease of the brain. Be sure to reference the assigned reading to support your points. Finally, conclude your paper with commentary on how the field of addiction treatment has benefited since acceptance of the disease model. Please make this paper different.
Please do not use books (exception for text book), blogs, or editorials.
No reference greater than 4 years old
All references must be verifiable.
Addiction as a Disease of the Brain
Addiction is a chronic illness that occurs among its patients, even after undergoing a treatment episode or a long abstinence duration (Parekh, 2017). The disease is characterized by an uncontrollable craving, searching, and substance usage when one is facing extremely adverse consequences. The relapses of addiction happen at a rate likened to the relapse rates of chronic medical illnesses such as asthma and diabetes (Bala et al., 2018). To this effect, regular treatments will be required to increase the intervals of recurrence. As a brain disease, addiction to substances such as drugs will lead to an acute modification of one’s mood, memory, point of view, and emotional state. The repetitive use of the substances causes changes to the brain’s structure and functions such that the affected individual will lose control over their initially voluntary behaviors. The loss of control among some patients becomes extensively compulsive, relatable to other brain diseases such as schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease. To this effect, the treatment approaches adopted are similar to those applied in treating some brain diseases.
The acceptance of addiction as a disease model in addiction treatment resulted in the creation of a multidisciplinary treatment team engaging in extensive research to find the right treatment approaches, how to appropriately manage and monitor the patients to achieve the long term objectives of controlling diseases and individual management. Recently, advancements have been made within the neurobiology field that clarifies the mechanisms that form the basis of disruptions to decision-making and the balance of emotions among the addicts (Volkow et al., 2016). These advancements explain the critical biologic processes disrupted to alter voluntary behavioral control (Volkow et al., 2016). The research can illustrate how and why addiction occurs as a brain disease.
References
Bala, S., Sowmya, K., CJ, R., Mahendra, K., Fateh, A., Fatteh, S., & Ahmed, A., Raghavendra Rao MV. (2018). Is Addiction A Brain Disorder? Indian Journal of Research. 7(9).
Parekh, R. (2017). What is addiction? Retrieved from https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/addiction/what-is-addiction
Volkow, N. D., Koob, G. F., & McLellan, A. T. (2016). Neurobiology advances from the brain disease model of addiction. New England Journal of Medicine, 374(4), 363-371.
