In this episode, author Maia Szalavitz breaks down the helpful and not-so-helpful approaches to drug addiction. She discusses her own journey with addiction, the problems with "tough love," why shame and humiliation don't work, harm reduction, and how other countries have compassionately solved addiction. Plus, Maia and Matthew discuss "pandemic shaming" and the parallels between shaming addicts and “anti-maskers/vaxers” into changing their behavior (hint: shame doesn't work).
Maia Szalavitz is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, which is widely recognized as an important advance in thinking about the nature of addiction and how to cope with it, personally and politically. Her book, Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids was the first to expose the damage caused by the “tough love” business that dominates adolescent addiction treatment. She has written for numerous publications from High Times to the New York Times, including TIME, the Washington Post, the Guardian, VICE, Scientific American, and the Atlantic— and she is author or co-author of five other books. With Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, she co-wrote the classic work on child trauma, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog and also Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential—And Endangered. She has won awards from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Drug Policy Alliance, the American Psychological Association and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology for her 30 years of groundbreaking writing on addiction, drug policy and neuroscience. Her new book is Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction.
Find Maia's collection of books here.
Matthew S. Goodman, Ph.D. is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist (PSY32423) and Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences in the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. He is also a writer and filmmaker. Follow his work here: http://matthewgoodmanphd.com or here: https://matthewgoodmanphd.medium.com Watch The Middle Way podcast interviews on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmga5Z4JdHziQjtCdnVhYuw If you enjoy this content, do us a favor and rate, review, and share the podcast with a friend! : )
