Diseasing of America is a classic that marked a turning point in the addictions field. Stanton Peele dared to assert that while alcoholism and drug-taking may be addictions, they are not diseases. In this plainspoken and courageous critique of America's approach to addiction, Peele attacks the "addiction as disease" model promoted by Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous, and drug treatment centers. He argues that more practical therapies - behavioral, family oriented, and community based - and normal maturational experiences help people more than AA. Peele documents the scientific fallacies and institutional corruption of the addiction-as-disease movement. In a sweeping historical and social commentary, Peele points the way to positive personal and social change by showing how we can support people in living non-addicted lives. Ultimately, he asserts, the only effective response to addiction is to recreate living communities that nurture constructive human capacities and give people a real stake in life.

Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Peele, Stanton

Addiction & Recovery

Lexington Books

How much is too much: Healthy habits or destructive addictions (A Spectrum book)

PRENTICE/HALL

Challenges the myth that alcoholism and drug use are biochemical diseases necessitating medical treatment, treatment that has become big business, and emphasizes our strength and capacity to change by choice

Diseasing of America: Addiction Treatment Out of Control

Houghton/Mifflin

Applies the nature and process of addiction to human relationships characterized by interpersonal dependency rather than true love and to the social and cultural reinforcers of that dependency, suggesting corrective procedures and techniques

Love and Addiction

Self-Help

Brodsky, Archie

Relationships

Signet Books

In Love and Addiction,  published 40 years ago and sold as a mass-market paperback on love, Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky laid out every major issue confronting the addiction field today. This pioneering classic, which was excerpted in Cosmopolitan and spawned the codependence movement, is the first—and still the definitive—book on addictive love. But it is much more than that; it is the book that explains why addiction is not what we think it is. Love and Addiction focuses on dependent love relationships to explore what both love and addiction really are—psychologically, socially, and culturally.    Addiction is an overgrown, dependent, destructive relationship. Love is the opposite, a sharing, growth-inspiring one. The authors’ analysis makes clear that an addiction is an experience that takes on meaning and power in light of a person’s needs, desires, beliefs, expectations, and fears. By showing how addiction grows out of ordinary human experience, Peele and Brodsky offer a liberating understanding of all  addictions—to alcohol, drugs, tobacco, food, gambling, shopping, electronic media, sex, or love.  In 1975, Love and Addiction boldly proposed ideas whose truth is only now being recognized:  Addiction is not limited to drugs, and drugs are not necessarily addictive.  AA’s 12 steps are not the last word in addiction treatment. On the contrary, practically oriented addiction treatments are more effective.   The goal of addiction treatment and recovery is not abstinence to the exclusion of all else, but to build a life that rules out addiction.   Love is the opposite of the self-protective constriction of addiction; it is the expansion of your spirit with another human being.    Remarkably, all of these issues—the widespread application of the addiction diagnosis, the limited value of AA and its disease theory, the possibility that people can continue using but still eliminate addiction (harm reduction)—are as hotly debated today as when Peele and Brodsky first analyzed addiction forty years ago. Most remarkably of all, the answers Peele and Brodsky arrived at in Love and Addiction are only now being embraced by progressive thinkers in the field.   “Destined to become a classic!” Psychology Today proclaimed in 1975. Rereading Love and Addiction 35 years later, addiction researcher Rowdy Yates wrote that the book “still reads absolutely true as an understanding of addictive behavior.”  Reading today this clairvoyant analysis of the most challenging issues we face in the twenty-first century—the meaning of love and the cure for addiction—you will recognize both the current relevance and enduring value of Love and Addiction, now reissued with a new (2015) Authors’ Preface, the Authors’ Preface written for the 1991 paperback reissue, and a brief new introduction to each chapter.  Otherwise, nothing has been changed in the original book.

Signet

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Books by Peele, Stanton