Member-only story
This Is One Huge Cause Of Addiction
Make no mistake, political explanations are valid too!
We need a more holistic way of studying these societal issues. Science is only one method.
Addiction is a widespread, severe, and extremely misunderstood mental illness. I certainly don’t want to act as though this article could exhaust all explanation. Lately, though, I’ve been responding to a number of ideas presented in a new book I was invited to review. The book is called Overloaded: How Every Aspect of Your Life is Influenced by Your Brain Chemicals, authored by Ginny Smith. And there was something she wrote therein that greatly elucidated, for me anyway, how important community is to ones mental health; and how the lack of it is deeply connected with addictions to substances of abuse.
Isolation even impacts rats
In Overloaded, Ginny Smith spoke meticulously about what has been observed in numerous experiments conducted on lab rats. One series of such studies is known as ‘rat park’. She writes,
“Bruce Alexander and colleagues at Simon Fraser University, Canada, found that if the rats were…kept in groups, in large cages with running wheels, platforms for climbing on and plenty of places to hide, they consumed a…