
Rat Park experiment upturns conventional wisdom about addiction - paddy_m
http://sub.garrytan.com/its-not-the-morphine-its-the-size-of-the-cage-rat-park-experiment-upturns-conventional-wisdom-about-addiction
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chimeracoder
Not only is this not new, but this approach has already been incorporated into
many of the more progressive (and, incidentally, more successful) drug
treatment programs.

It turns out that, when you treat substance abuse as a symptom of an
underlying problem and not a symptom of the substance itself (the same way we
do for alcohol), you end up with a much more effective treatment strategy.

It's funny that it's taking us this long to come to that realization, when
even the DSM IV outlines specific criteria for substance abuse and substance
dependence, and most habitual users of drugs fit neither of these.

Funny anecdote: Szasz's "Rat Park" study originally appeared in a relatively
unknown journal because it was rejected from all the mainstream ones for being
"too much of a deviation" from the mainstream schools of thought.

~~~
pasbesoin
In a pithy sentence: People are self-medicating _for a reason_.

I love how so many "well-meaning" people continue to often, apparently quite
wilfully and in correspondence with their own perceived self-interest, turn a
blind eye to those reasons.

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Sharlin
Link to the original paper:
[http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00426903](http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00426903)

"New" apparently now means "35 years old" ;)

~~~
dllthomas
Yeah, I was hoping this was a recent validation of that study. If anything
ever needed a mod re-titling...

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mjn
Earlier discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6391701](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6391701)

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dschiptsov
It is no news that substance abuse has environmental and social factors much
more powerful that physiological.

Not just rats will avoid poison when there is an alternative and will consume
it if nothing else to do.)

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lifeisstillgood
a thank you to paddy and Garry for something that may not be new to the world
but is new to me - a nice experiment with a counter-prevailing-wisdom result.

My intellectual curiosity is satisfied thanks

