The Urge
Our History of Addiction
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4.2 • 11 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and The Boston Globe
An authoritative, illuminating, and deeply humane history of addiction—a phenomenon that remains baffling and deeply misunderstood despite having touched countless lives—by an addiction psychiatrist striving to understand his own family and himself
“Carl Erik Fisher’s The Urge is the best-written and most incisive book I’ve read on the history of addiction. In the midst of an overdose crisis that grows worse by the hour and has vexed America for centuries, Fisher has given us the best prescription of all: understanding. He seamlessly blends a gripping historical narrative with memoir that doesn’t self-aggrandize; the result is a full-throated argument against blaming people with substance use disorder. The Urge is a propulsive tour de force that is as healing as it is enjoyable to read.” —Beth Macy, author of Dopesick
As a psychiatrist in training fresh from medical school, Carl Erik Fisher found himself face-to-face with an addiction crisis that nearly cost him everything. Desperate to make sense of his condition, he turned to the history of addiction, learning that our society’s current quagmire is only part of a centuries-old struggle to treat addictive behavior.
A rich, sweeping account that probes not only medicine and science but also literature, religion, philosophy, and public policy, The Urge introduces us to those who have endeavored to address addiction through the ages and examines the treatments that have produced relief for many people, the author included. Only by reckoning with our history of addiction, Fisher argues, can we light the way forward for those whose lives remain threatened by its hold.
The Urge is at once an eye-opening history of ideas, a riveting personal story of addiction and recovery, and a clinician’s urgent call for a more nuanced and compassionate view of one of society’s most intractable challenges.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fisher, an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, makes a striking debut by skillfully combining a cultural history of addiction with his own story of recovery. He first looks to ancient philosophers and thinkers, noting that early definitions of addiction hinged on a "gray area between free will and compulsion." This anticipated the contemporary notion that mental disorders, including addiction, exist on a continuum. Fisher focuses mainly on the U.S., where the idea of addiction as a disease gained traction around the time of the Revolutionary War and later spawned religious temperance movements, Alcoholics Anonymous, and the war on drugs. He also shows how treatments have swayed between compassionate, rehabilitative approaches and prohibitive crackdowns, and argues that the current quality of care is "woefully" inadequate. Along the way, he shares plenty of moving stories of the scientists, preachers, and patients on the front lines of addiction and movingly recounts his own struggle with alcohol and Adderall addiction while he was a physician in Columbia's psychiatry residency program: "The fear, shame, and strategizing were exhausting." There's as much history here as there is heart.
