A Biopsychosocial Approach to Understand Addiction

Humans are social creatures. A biopsychosocial model incorporates the scientific understanding that the biology of human beings, including their brain biology, is from conception until death is in profound interaction with and is shaped by their relationships with other people and by their own emotional states. In real life the physiology of people cannot be separated from their minds.

As the psychiatrist Thomas Hora said, “When we get the what, we know the how.” Before we ask what to do about addiction, we have to define our perspective. What we do about any phenomenon depends on our understanding of it.The available information about addiction is inadequate, hence the high failure rate of programs. The mainstream view of addiction (as compared with the medical view) is that addiction is a matter of individual choice, moral failure, or weakness. Thus exist the approaches aimed at deterrence or punishment.

The medical view is that addiction is a disease of the brain, with disordered brain circuits and disordered behaviors. This view is both accurate, so far as it goes, and hopelessly narrow. It is accurate because the addicted brain is demonstrably a physiologically dysfunctional brain, but narrow because it seeks to explain the dysfunction in strictly physiological and biochemical terms, without recognizing the emotional and social inputs into how the brain operates. (See biopsychosocial above.) Different as they are, these two views share a lack of understanding that addiction is a product of and a response to life experience; in fact, it’s neither a conscious choice nor an inherited illness.

Addiction is a complex issue and to make progress, it should be addressed from several angles.