New Ways to Understand and Treat Addiction

The following is a conversation between Maia Szalavitz, Author of Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, and Denver Frederick, the Host of The Business of Giving. Drug overdoses now kill more Americans annually than guns, cars, or breast cancer. Yet despite this, our understanding of addiction is stuck with ideas from a bygone era. My next guest has explored new ways to understand addiction from viewing it as a learning disorder, as she did in her groundbreaking book Unbroken Brain, to the idea of harm reduction, which will be central to her new book coming out next year titled Undoing Drugs. She is Author and Neuroscience Journalist Maia Szalavitz, who's with us now.