Seminars in Addiction Psychiatry

At the start of the 21st Century, 'addiction' is said to be a 'disease' in most Western industrialized countries (1), and in the USA the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) refers to it as a 'brain disease'. However, when reading about the problems presented by drugs and alcohol you will encounter a range of terms ('addict', 'alcoholic', 'alcohol misuse', 'drug abuse', 'substance dependence') which seem to overlap and sometimes contradict each other. As is common with a lot of medical terminology, the meaning of many of these words has changed over time as they have started to be used out of their original context, and this can be a barrier to effective communication about the subject. Furthermore, the disease concept of addiction is not the only explanation of the problem, and some have argued that addiction is 'a set of ideas which have a history and a cultural location' (2)--