Let’s Commend Fact-Based Thinking: Except With Alcohol

January 25, 2018

Kurt Anderson commends rationality and science (except for alcohol, of course). I have to tip my hat to New York magazine writer and public radio host, Kurt Anderson, for passionately detailing how America has descended into irrational and magical thinking(“How America Lost Its Mind”), since I wrote about this idea (“America, Land of the Irrational”) in PT in 2008. Why, […]

Anthony Bourdain’s Updated Addiction Report Card

June 27, 2017

He may smoke, he certainly drinks and, good God, that 60-year-old is trim!   This post is in response to Anthony Bourdain’s Addiction Report Card by Stanton Peele Anthony Bourdain is the worldly gastronomical traveler with an addictive past.  In his 2000 best seller Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain described his ascent into the premier kitchens of […]

I’m Sorry If You Can’t Drink Alcohol

June 12, 2017

It’s a regrettable loss to your life, which you may find necessary. I have an older friend (even older than me!) who can no longer drink alcohol or coffee. She has had an unusual drinking career. She came from a Midwestern WASP family who didn’t drink at home. She went to an Ivy League college at a […]

How The Today Show and Ronan Farrow Kept Me from Telling the Truth About Addiction

June 8, 2017

  Source: Vice on-line magazine I have described how liberals are the most ardent supporters of the disease theory of addiction. (Disclosure, I am a liberal.) This truth was driven home for me by my recent humiliation on The Today Show at the hands of Ronan Farrow.  Farrow presented three related woman who had each […]

Are Addiction and Mental Illness Really Brain Diseases?

June 5, 2017

The two primary (New York) intellectual organs, the New York Review of Books and The New York Times, have recently featured two powerful cultural icons saying exactly opposite things. Marcia Angell, the first woman editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and now at the Harvard Medical School, in an ongoing, two-part series in […]

The Health Care Crisis and the Addiction Crisis Are the Same

Donald Trump was elected by a white underclass that is resentful, suicidal, and addictive, and whose existence is declining rapidly. The most noted element in the current health-care debate is how the Republicans’ White House champion, along with the Republican Congress headed by Paul Ryan, is driven to deprive poorer Americans, white and black, of […]

My Impact on the Addiction World: An Exchange With My Bartender

May 30, 2017

My Impact on the Addiction World: An Exchange With My Bartender On viewing the video of The Today Show’s treatment of addiction, with a few seconds from me as the only opponent of the disease theory, my bartender (and friend) emailed me: Great shot of the apartment! (He helped me move.) Two main questions come […]

Subject: INSPIRED. A plea from a dissident

May 29, 2017

Subject: INSPIRED. A plea from a dissident Dear Dr. Stanton Peele, I am in much need of your advice. I am nervous sending this to you because, 1: I am anxious and have been most of my life; 2: I am afraid of any consequences that may follow as a result of my honesty. Let […]

Donald Trump and Addictive Behaviors, Part II

May 19, 2017

Vainglorious in victory, denying defeat, Donald uses strategies of the addicted Um, Mr. President? No votes were taken with Democrats present. Psychological projection is a syndrome in which humans defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others. Donald Trump‘s speech on the defeat […]

Donald Trump and Addictive Behaviors

April 19, 2017

When the addiction cycle characterizes dysfunctional human behavior. The Wall Street Journal has likened the President of the United States to an alcoholic, claiming that Trump clings to his lies “like a drunk to an empty gin bottle.” We tend today to avoid disparaging references to addiction, but in what sense is the addiction reference true? […]