Escaping Addiction: Resetting the Brain for Success

Presents a variety of effective tools to break the cycle of addiction.
Addiction is a worldwide curse that seems to be growing in seriousness on a yearly basis. While to the general public addiction may seem almost inescapable, the truth is that there are solutions to overcoming the various addictions, though to date they seem more elusive than attainable. The goal of Escaping Addiction is to highlight the variety of causes of addiction alongside an array of useful tools anyone can use to break the cycle of addiction, whether it’s to alcohol, drugs, food, or video games.
The seeds of addictive behavior are often planted in childhood then fed to grow over years of the input and reward cycle. Detaching the rewards from the addictive input is key to breaking the habits that keep us addicted. Here, the authors present the variety of treatments – from medications to therapeutic approaches – that can help. Offering a better understanding of the mechanisms of addiction, this book can help anyone struggling with addiction to unravel it in their own lives.

Patrick Bordeaux, MD, is a dual citizen of France and the US. Bordeaux is currently Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Faculty of Medicine Université Laval in Quebec City, Canada, and practices Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in Quebec. He is also a consulting child and adolescent psychiatrist in the province of New Brunswick, Canada. He is a Fellow of The Royal College of Physicians of Canada (FRCPC) and of The American Psychiatric Association (FAPA), a Diplomate of the American Board of Addiction Medicine (DABAM), and a member of The Canadian Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

George Koob, PhD, has been Director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) since 2014. Koob has published over 650 peer reviewed papers and several books including the Neurobiology of Addiction. He spent much of his early career at the Scripps Research Institute as the Director of the Alcohol Research Center, and as Professor and Chair of the Scripps’ Committee on the Neurobiology of Addictive Disorders. He has also served as a researcher in the Department of Neurophysiology at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge, and as staff scientist in the Arthur Vining Davis Center for Behavioral Neurobiology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.