Dr. Gabor Maté

Went to an excellent talk by Dr. Gabor Maté today called "The Four Compassions: A humane response to addictions". It was really worthwhile. Dr. Maté was excellent on the topic of reasons for addiction - ie. adverse childhood experiences. He also talked about epigenetics, in a nice counterpoint to Dr. Kolb's talk at Neuroscience Day. Dr. Kolb talked about animal models of infant neuroplasticity, while Dr. Maté's talk was effectively about the exact same thing, only he used examples taken from his work in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. He works with addictions and mental health problems, and most if not all of the people he works with show this pattern of childhood trauma and lack of attachment. He said they compare the feeling of using heroin to getting a hug. These people never received affection, and the closest thing they can find comes out of a needle.

There was also a very strong theme of "judge not lest ye be judged", which is definitely going to be something to keep in mind while working with these kinds of populations. (I would imagine, anyway - hopefully this Stonehenge visit will happen soon!)

Finally, in the questions section, Dr. Maté talked about the very strong link between ADD/ADHD, gambling problems, and addiction. Hmmm. Possibly something to screen for in our populations? Maybe even address?

However, this did depress me a little in research terms. Most substance-dependent individuals clearly have a lot of underlying problems. How likely is it that a purely cognitive manipulation will help? I'm eager to get started on seeing if we can get this devaluation effect in undergrad using sexual stimuli or however we decide to do that - or maybe in a population like smokers. Just to see if it's going to work so we can get moving on the bigger stuff.