Lance M. Dodes is an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst best known for his theory that addictions are psychological compulsions. [1] [2] [3]
Dodes received an A.B. from Dartmouth College in 1966, his D.M.S. from Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine in 1968, and his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1970. He is a training and supervising analyst emeritus of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. [4]
Prior to Dodes' work, psychological theories about addiction separated them from other common psychological symptoms. [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] Dodes was first to characterize addictions as identical to the symptoms of compulsions, [10] a view that allows for understanding and treating addictions the same way as other compulsive symptoms. In his book The Heart of Addiction and peer-reviewed academic articles, Dodes argued that addiction is a symptom that reflects a need to reverse overwhelming feelings of helplessness. [11] [12] [13] [14] His second book, Breaking Addiction: A 7-Step Handbook for Ending Any Addiction was honored as a Library Journal Best Book in its category. [15]
In The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry, [16] Dodes and his co-author reviewed 50 years of research and said that most people who have experienced Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) have not achieved long-term sobriety, and only five to eight percent of the people who go to one or more AA meetings achieve sobriety for longer than one year. [17] The book was featured in a NPR segment [18] and a New York Times review. [19] The 5–8% figure put forward by Dodes is controversial. [20]
In 2004 Dodes appeared in an episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! [21] In 2015 he appeared as an expert in the film "The Business of Recovery". [22] He contributed an essay to the 2017 book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump , [23] and had an opinion letter expressing concerns about Trump's emotional stability published by The New York Times. [24]
In 2001, Dodes was honored by the Division on Addictions at Harvard Medical School for “Distinguished Contribution” to the study and treatment of addictive behavior. [25]
In 2009, Dodes was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry. [26]
Dodes was awarded an Author Prize by Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing for being in the top 5% of authors in 2011 and has remained in the top 5% through 2018 (the last year for which there are figures). [27]
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help){{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)University of California professor Herbert Fingarette cited two [...] statistics: at eighteen months, 25 percent of people still attended AA, and of those who did attend, 22 percent consistently maintained sobriety. [Reference: H. Fingarette, Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)] Taken together, these numbers show that about 5.5 percent of all those who started with AA became sober members.
studies show that 12-step treatment improves outcomes by up to 20% for as long as two years post-treatment via its ability to engage patients, and also tends to produce much higher rates of continuous abstinence than other forms of treatment