Addiction Psychiatry and The New Medicine

May 21, 2012

I have always believed that addictive disorders can teach us valuable lessons about other psychiatric conditions and about human behavior in general.  Addictions obviously involve behavior patterns, learning and memory processes, social influences, disturbed emotions, and environmental complexities.  Successful treatment of addiction requires attention to all of these facets of the disorder, and the addict often describes the recovery process not simply as being relieved of an illness, but as enduring a transformative, life-changing experience.

“Addiction psychiatry” is the area of psychiatry devoted to the treatment of these complicated disorders.  Certain trends in addiction psychiatry, however, seem to mirror larger trends in psychiatry as  whole.  Their impact on the future treatment of addictive behavior has yet to be determined, so it would be good to evaluate these trends to determine whether we’re headed in a direction we truly want to go.

Neurobiology:  Addiction psychiatry—like the rest of psychiatry—is slowly abandoning the patient and is becoming a largely neuroscientific enterprise.  While it is absolutely true that neurobiology has something to do with the addict’s repetitive, self-destructive behavior, and “brain reward pathways” are clearly involved, these do not tell the whole story.  Addicts refer to “people, places, and things” as the triggers for drug and alcohol use, not “dopamine, nucleus accumbens, and frontal cortex.”  This isn’t an argument against the need to study the biology of addiction, but to keep due focus on other factors which may affect one’s biology.  Virtually the same thing could also be said for most of what we treat in psychiatry; a multitude of factors might explain the presence of symptoms, but we’ve adopted a bias to think strictly in terms of brain pathways.

Medications:  Researchers in the addiction field (not to mention drug companies) devote much of their effort to disxover medications to treat addictions.  While they may stumble upon some useful adjunctive therapies, a “magic bullet” for addiction will probably never be found.  Moreover, I fear that the promise of medication-based treatments may foster a different sort of “dependence” among patients.  At this year’s APA Annual Meeting, for instance, I frequently heard the phrase “addictions are like other psychiatric disorders and therefore require lifelong treatment” (a statement which, by the way, is probably incorrect on TWO counts).  They weren’t talking about lifelong attendance at AA meetings or relapse prevention strategies, but rather to the need to take Suboxone or methadone (or the next “miracle drug”) indefinitely to achieve successful recovery.  Thus, as with other psychiatric disorders– many of which might only need short-term interventions but usually result in chronic pharmacological management—the long-term management of addiction may not reside in the maintenance of a strong recovery program but in the taking of a pill.

New Providers:  Once a relatively unpopular subspecialty, addiction psychiatry is now a burgeoning field, thanks to this new focus on neurobiology and medication management—areas in which psychiatrists consider themselves well versed.  For example, a psychiatrist can become an “addiction psychiatrist” by receiving “Suboxone certification” (i.e., taking an 8-hour online course to obtain a special DEA license to prescribe buprenorphine, an opioid agonist).  I have nothing against Suboxone: patients who take daily Suboxone are far less likely to use opioids, more likely to remain in treatment, and less likely to suffer the consequences of opioid abuse.  In fact, one might argue that the effectiveness of Suboxone—and methadone, for that matter—for opioid dependence is far greater than that of SSRIs in the treatment of depression.  Many Suboxone prescribers, however, have little exposure to the psychosocial aspects—and hard work—involved in fully treating (or overcoming) an addiction, and a pill is simply a substitute for opioids (which itself can be abused).  Nevertheless, prescribing a medication at monthly intervals—sometimes with little discussion about progress toward other recovery goals—resembles everything else we do in psychiatry; it’s no wonder that we’re drawn to it.

Patients:  Like many patients who seek psychiatric help, addicts might start to see “recovery” as a simple matter of making an appointment with a doctor and getting a prescription.  To be sure, many patients have used drugs like Suboxone or methadone to help them overcome deadly addictions, just as some individuals with major depression owe their lives to SSRIs or ECT.  But others have been genuinely hurt by these drugs.  Patients who have successfully discontinued Suboxone often say that it was the most difficult drug to stop—worse than any other opioid they had abused in the past.  Patients should always be reminded of the potential risks and dangers of treatment.  More importantly, we providers have an obligation to make patients aware of other ways of achieving sobriety and when to use them.  Strategies that don’t rely so heavily on the medical model might require a lot more work, but the payoffs may be much greater.

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Addictions involve complex biological, psychological, and social dimensions that differ from person to person.  The response of the psychiatric profession has been to devote more research to the neurobiology of addictions and the development of anti-addiction drugs, potentially at the expense of exploring other aspects that may be more promising.  As expected, psychiatrists, pharmaceutical companies, third-party payers, and the general public are quickly buying into this model.

Psychiatry finds itself in a Catch-22.  On the one hand, psychiatry is often criticized for not being “medical,” and focusing on the biology of addiction is a good way to adhere to the medical model (and, perhaps, lead us to better pharmacotherapies).  On the other hand, psychiatric disorders—and especially addictions—are multifactorial in nature, and successful treatment often requires a comprehensive approach.  Fortunately, it may not yet be too late for psychiatry to retreat from a full-scale embrace of the medical model.  Putting the patient first sometimes means stepping away from the science.  And as difficult and non-intuitive as that may be, sometimes that’s where the healthiest recovery can be found.

11 Comments | addiction, psychiatry | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by stevebMD

Addiction Medicine: A New Specialty Or More Of The Same?

July 14, 2011

In an attempt to address a significant—and unmet—need in contemporary health care, the American Board of Addiction Medicine (ABAM) has accredited ten new residency programs in “addiction medicine.”  Details can be found in this article in the July 10 New York Times.  This new initiative will permit young doctors who have completed medical school and an initial internship year to spend an additional year learning about the management of addictive disease.

To be sure, there’s a definite need for trained addiction specialists.  Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), says that the lack of knowledge about substance abuse among physicians is “a very serious problem,” and I have certainly found this to be true.  Addictions to drugs and alcohol are devastating (and often life-threatening) conditions that many doctors are ill-prepared to understand—much less treat—and such disorders frequently complicate the management of many medical and psychiatric conditions.

Having worked in the addiction field, however (and having had my own personal experiences in the recovery process), I’m concerned about the precedent that these programs might set for future generations of physicians treating addictive illness.

As much as I respect addiction scientists and agree that the neurochemical basis of addiction deserves greater study, I disagree (in part) with the countless experts who have pronounced for the last 10-20 years that addiction is “a brain disease.”  In my opinion, addiction is a brain disease in the same way that “love” is a rush of dopamine or “anxiety” is a limbic system abnormality.  In other words: yes, addiction clearly does involve the brain, but overcoming one’s addiction (which means different things to different people) is a process that transcends the process of simply taking a pill, correcting one’s biochemistry, or fixing a mutant gene.  In some cases it requires hard work and immense will power; in other cases, a grim recognition of one’s circumstances (“hitting bottom”) and a desire to change; and in still other cases, a “spiritual awakening.”  None of these can be prescribed by a doctor.

In fact, the best argument against the idea of addiction as a biological illness is simple experience.  Each of us has heard of the alcoholic who got sober by going to meetings; or the heroin addict who successfully quit “cold turkey”; or the hard-core cocaine user who stopped after a serious financial setback or the threat of losing his job, marriage, or both.  In fact, these stories are actually quite common.  By comparison, no one overcomes diabetes after experiencing “one too many episodes of ketoacidosis,” and no one resolves their hypertension by establishing a relationship with a Higher Power.

That’s not to say that pharmacological remedies have no place in the treatment of addiction.  Methadone and buprenorphine (Suboxone) are legal, prescription substitutes for heroin and other opioids, and they have allowed addicts to live respectable, “functional” lives.  Drugs like naltrexone or Topamax might curb craving for alcohol in at least some alcoholic patients (of course, when you’re talking about the difference between 18 beers/day and 13 beers/day, you might correctly ask, “what’s the point?”), and other pharmaceuticals might do the same for such nasty things as cocaine, nicotine, gambling, or sugar & flour.

But we in medicine tend to overemphasize the pharmacological solution.  My own specialty of psychiatry is the best example of this:  we have taken extremely rich, complicated, and variable human experiences and phenotypes and distilled them into a bland, clinical lexicon replete with “symptoms” and “disorders,” and prescribe drugs that supposedly treat those disorders—on the basis of studies that rarely resemble the real world—while at the same time frequently ignoring the very real personal struggles that each patient endures.  (Okay, time to get off my soapbox.)

A medical specialty focusing on addictions is a fantastic idea and holds tremendous promise for those who suffer from these absolutely catastrophic conditions.  But ONLY if it transcends the “medical” mindset and instead sees these conditions as complex psychological, spiritual, motivational, social, (mal)adaptive, life-defining—and, yes, biochemical—phenomena that deserve comprehensive and multifaceted care.  As with much in psychiatry, there will be some patients whose symptoms or “brain lesions” are well defined and who respond well to a simple medication approach (a la the “medical model”), but the majority of patients will have vastly more complicated reasons for using, and an equally vast number of potential solutions they can pursue.

Whether this can be taught in a one-year Addiction Medicine residency remains to be seen.  Some physicians, for example, call themselves “addiction specialists” simply by completing an 8-hour-long online training course to prescribe Suboxone to heroin and Oxycontin abusers.  (By the way, Reckitt Benckiser, the manufacturer of Suboxone, is not a drug company, but is better known by its other major products:  Lysol, Mop & Glo, Sani Flush, French’s mustard, and Durex condoms.)  Hopefully, an Addiction Medicine residency will be more than a year-long infomercial for the latest substitution and “anti-craving” agents from multi-national conglomerates.

Nevertheless, the idea that new generations of young doctors will be trained specifically in the diagnosis and management of addictive disorders is a very welcome one indeed.  The physicians who choose this specialty will probably do so for a very particular reason, perhaps—even though this is by no means essential—due to their own personal experience or the experience of a loved one.  I simply hope that their teachers remind them that addiction is incredibly complicated, no two patients become “addicted” for the same reasons, and successful treatment often relies upon ignoring the obvious and digging more deeply into one’s needs, worries, concerns, anxieties, and much, much more.  This has certainly been my experience in psychiatry, and I’d hate to think that TWO medical specialties might be corrupted by an aggressive focus on a medication-centric, “one-size-fits-all” approach to the complexity of human nature.

16 Comments | addiction, medications | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by stevebMD

Misplaced Priorities in Addiction Treatment?

January 31, 2011

Can an addiction be treated with a drug?  Imagine: a simple pill to satisfy all of one’s cravings for drugs or alcohol, and to avoid the ravages of this disease.  It would revolutionize our treatment of addiction.  And since we’re constantly told that addiction is a brain disease, it only makes sense that, once we understand the underlying biology, we’ll be able to create just such a pill, right?  Countless researchers, labs, and pharmaceutical companies are indeed trying to do this, as we speak.

The addict struggling to get clean might scramble to be first in line to receive this magic pill.  The recovered addict, on the other hand, would probably argue that a chemical solution, a “drug to end all drugs,” so to speak, is far too simplistic.  Addictions are behavioral, psychological, social, and spiritual problems (and, yes, they also have some underlying neurochemical factors, too).  A pill may treat withdrawal symptoms, or help to reduce the complications of intoxication, or to minimize craving, but even if that pill is 99% effective in reducing cravings, or preventing the intoxicating effect of a drug, the addict will always look to achieve that 1%.  It’s how the disease works.

I mention this not only because I am familiar with the recovery process (including the twelve-step approach, which is decidedly not pharmacological but is probably the closest thing we have to an “effective treatment”), but I am also familiar with how well-meaning professionals often trivialize addiction and recovery.  Our own biases sometimes keep us from recognizing what should be obvious.

A good example is in the January 2011 American Journal of Psychiatry, which contains a letter to the editor suggesting that disulfiram (commonly known as Antabuse) ought to be investigated for its “anticraving” properties.  They point out that disulfiram may increase levels of dopamine in the brain, and since dopamine is “involved” in reward (and addicts sometimes have decreased dopamine activity in the reward pathways), it may reduce craving for addictive drugs and behaviors.

For those of you who don’t know about Antabuse, it has been around since the 1940s and is known as an “aversive” agent.  When a person drinks alcohol while taking Antabuse, the drug impairs one of the key steps in alcohol metabolism, leading to the build-up of acetaldehyde in the blood, which causes sweating, nausea, vomiting, flushing, and headache.  By itself, Antabuse has no effect on drinking or the desire to drink, but when an alcoholic drinks on Antabuse, the reaction is so uncomfortable that the person learns this association with alcohol and avoids it in the future.  (Good old-fashioned classical conditioning at work.)

My reaction to the letter in the journal is not that the authors were factually incorrect, or that we shouldn’t study disulfiram and its properties, but that their argument misses the point.  Despite decades of experience with Antabuse, we still have alcoholism and other addictive behaviors, so obviously it’s not a magic bullet.  And people who take Antabuse still crave alcohol, so it doesn’t reduce craving to any meaningful degree (in fact, one of the arguments against using Antabuse is that people who want to drink– which is, unfortunately, most alcoholics– simply stop taking it.)  The authors cite a case study in which a patient’s desire to gamble “disappeared completely” after taking Antabuse, but as with most everything in psychiatry, how do we know this had anything to do with the drug?

It’s quite naive to think that a simple pill will work in an addiction when addictions are far more complex entities.  It reminds me of the doctor who chooses Wellbutrin instead of a different antidepressant for a depressed patient “because she smokes” (the active compound in Wellbutrin, bupropion, also sold as Zyban, has been shown to be effective in smoking cessation).  Or the doctor who prescribes Suboxone for the daily Oxycontin and Vicodin addict.  Or the doctor who adds Topamax to the regimen of the obese bipolar patient (because some studies show a modest decrease in food craving).

These are not bad ideas (and yes, I’ve seen them all), but again they miss the point.  The depressed smoker isn’t going to give up nicotine because she’s all of a sudden taking Wellbutrin.  The opiate addict won’t unlearn his addictive behaviors and mindset because he’s now taking Suboxone.

If science continues to look at addictions through the lens of neurotransmitters and “reward pathways” in the brain, and to use animal models to study substance dependence (it goes without saying that a rat in a cage is quite different from the homeless crack-addicted prostitute, or the high-powered alcoholic CEO), then we will achieve nothing more than partial success in treating substance dependence.  The clinical trials for “anticraving” drugs like Campral and naltrexone themselves show how limited they are; they measure their effects in terms of “number of drinking days” or “time until first heavy drinking day.”  Not in binary terms like “drinking” or “not drinking.”

I know that none of the experts in the addiction field would ever suggest that a medication will solve any individual’s (much less society’s) addiction problem.  But I’m concerned about the non-expert clinician, who has neither experienced nor witnessed true addiction.  I’m also concerned about the addict, who sees a news headline about some new anti-alcoholism or anti-obesity pill and believes that the wonders of modern science will cure his addiction (so he doesn’t have to look at his own problems).

We in the field also need to be careful about what we promise our patients, and understand the limits of our science.  Perhaps we should go one step further and scrap the science altogether, and instead focus on other ways to understand what drives our patients to drink or use drugs, and emphasize a more comprehensive approach to recovery– and yes, one that will require the addict to do a lot more than just take a pill.

22 Comments | addiction, medications | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by stevebMD

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