Stanton Peele

A Controversial Argument Against the Disease Theory of Addiction Diseasing of America is a powerful and controversial rebuttal to the "addiction as disease model" that many vested interests-including doctors, counselors, psychologists, treatment centers, and twelve-step programs that specialize in addiction treatment-don't want you to read."I found the arguments in Diseasing of America persuasive and carefully documented. While I find current addiction-treatment models helpful, I think it is critical to look at Stanton Peele's work to question our fundamental assumptions and adjust them on the basis of data."-Jennifer P. Schneider, author of Back From Betrayal and Sex, Lies, and Forgiveness, and member of the American Society of Addiction Medicine"A provocative review of the uses and abuses of the disease model in the past three decades. This important book has significantly added to my education and clinical understanding of addiction in my professional practice."-Richard R. Irons, M.D., The Menninger Clinic

How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control

Diseasing of America

Ilse Thompson

Outlines a holistic program for addicts and their families based on evidence-based treatments, CBT, and meditation, rejecting conventional beliefs and programs to explain how to permanently overcome self-destructive compulsions.

Stop Thinking Like an Addict and Reclaim Your Life with The PERFECT Program

Recover!

Offers an unorthodox approach to help parents teach their children the fundamental skills and values that will protect them from substance abuse and keep experimentation with drugs and alcohol from turning into a more dangerous dependency.

A Realistic Approach to Preventing Drug, Alcohol, and Other Dependencies

Addiction Proof Your Child

Zach Rhoads

Drug overdoses continue to rise at an alarming rate throughout the U.S., resulting in 72,000 deaths last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The response, tragically, has been to charge full-speed ahead with "solutions" that have already, and consistently, failed. In this book, Stanton Peele, a prominent addiction expert, and Zach Rhoads, a child behavior interventionist and counselor, show that defining addiction as a "disease" makes recovery much more difficult, and that twelve-step programs fail for most participants. But they don't just criticize. They provide a solid, research-and-experience-based alternative approach that has proven to be successful in overcoming the scourges of suicide, depression, addiction, and drug-related deaths. The authors show that maturing out of addiction and childhood behavioral problems is a normal process--unless people are sidetracked by the widespread and commonplace therapies that undercut natural growth and self-confidence. They present extensive research data about natural recovery and case studies of fully recovered adults and of children with various conditions, for a developmental model of addiction that has been proven to help those who are suffering. Much of the focus is on childhood addiction, but their conclusions and methods are helpful for people of all ages. Their work forms the basis for the Life Process Program, a worldwide online parenting and addiction coaching service.

With Common Sense Instead of "disease" Therapy

Outgrowing Addiction

Archie Brodsky

In Love and Addiction, published 40 years ago and sold as a mass-market paperback on love, Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky laid out every major issue confronting the addiction field today. This pioneering classic, which was excerpted in Cosmopolitan and spawned the codependence movement, is the first-and still the definitive-book on addictive love. But it is much more than that; it is the book that explains why addiction is not what we think it is. Love and Addiction focuses on dependent love relationships to explore what both love and addiction really are-psychologically, socially, and culturally. Addiction is an overgrown, dependent, destructive relationship. Love is the opposite, a sharing, growth-inspiring one. The authors' analysis makes clear that an addiction is an experience that takes on meaning and power in light of a person's needs, desires, beliefs, expectations, and fears. By showing how addiction grows out of ordinary human experience, Peele and Brodsky offer a liberating understanding of all addictions-to alcohol, drugs, tobacco, food, gambling, shopping, electronic media, sex, or love. In 1975, Love and Addiction boldly proposed ideas whose truth is only now being recognized: Addiction is not limited to drugs, and drugs are not necessarily addictive. AA's 12 steps are not the last word in addiction treatment. On the contrary, practically oriented addiction treatments are more effective. The goal of addiction treatment and recovery is not abstinence to the exclusion of all else, but to build a life that rules out addiction. Love is the opposite of the self-protective constriction of addiction; it is the expansion of your spirit with another human being. Remarkably, all of these issues-the widespread application of the addiction diagnosis, the limited value of AA and its disease theory, the possibility that people can continue using but still eliminate addiction (harm reduction)-are as hotly debated today as when Peele and Brodsky first analyzed addiction forty years ago. Most remarkably of all, the answers Peele and Brodsky arrived at in Love and Addiction are only now being embraced by progressive thinkers in the field. "Destined to become a classic " Psychology Today proclaimed in 1975. Rereading Love and Addiction 35 years later, addiction researcher Rowdy Yates wrote that the book "still reads absolutely true as an understanding of addictive behavior." Reading today this clairvoyant analysis of the most challenging issues we face in the twenty-first century-the meaning of love and the cure for addiction-you will recognize both the current relevance and enduring value of Love and Addiction, now reissued with a new (2015) Authors' Preface, the Authors' Preface written for the 1991 paperback reissue, and a brief new introduction to each chapter. Otherwise, nothing has been changed in the original book.

Stanton Peele

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