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The Ecology of Addiction

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Addiction

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Abstract

People don’t become addicts in isolation. This is not news. In addition to the well-cited research showing that social connection is essential for the very survival, much less for the flourishing, of children, much work on addiction over the past two decades has focused on the importance of childhood influences on later substance use and abuse, and of social influences on transitioning into and out of addiction. For our purposes, this raises a problem: how can the results of this huge body of research showing the power of social relationships with respect to addiction be squared with either of the classes of theory that we have discussed? The role that other people play in increasing or decreasing an individual’s risk of addiction and hope for living free of it seems to deny both sides of the dichotomy.

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Notes

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Colorado Denver, USA

    Candice L. Shelby

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© 2016 Candice L. Shelby

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Shelby, C.L. (2016). The Ecology of Addiction. In: Addiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137552853_4

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