Understanding Addiction http://learntruehealth.com/understanding-addiction/ Understanding addiction, depression and anxiety rank high among the problems that people face. But conventional medicine often masks these problems by prescribing drugs. Johann Hari is a wonderful book author who is here today to explain the real cause of these problems and how we can solve it. Chasing The Scream Book In writing Chasing The Scream, Johann Hari recalls the personal journey it took for him to put the book together. He says the whole process taught him to think differently about something very close to his heart. You see, when Johann Hari was growing up, he realized his family was dealing with issues, and that triggered his curiosity on understanding addiction. Eventually, Johann Hari went to places that had different approaches to responding to addiction. According to Johann Hari, there are varying levels on how cultures deal with understanding addiction. Apparently, there are countries like Portugal wherein the government is compassionate when it comes to understanding addiction. “The thing that most surprised me for the book is that it led directly to the journey. For my new book, Lost Connections, I realized I had fundamentally misunderstood what addiction was,” said Johann Hari.  Johann Hari also shares that in countries like Great Britain, if a person steps out in front of a truck and breaks their hip, the hospital would give them a drug called diamorphine, for the pain. Incidentally, diamorphine is heroin in a medically pure form.  “If what we think about addiction is right, it should be happening to all these people in the hospitals, but it’s not. The dosage is strong, but people are not addicted to it. It’s the opposite for people who do drugs in the streets,” said Johann Hari. Rat Park Johann Hari only began understanding addiction when he went to Vancouver and met Professor Bruce Alexander who he says changed his life. Apparently, Professor Bruce Alexander explained this theory of addiction in a different light. Professor Bruce Alexander did an experiment way back in the 1970s using rats. One rat was isolated and did nothing but take drugs. To broaden the experiment, Professor Bruce Alexander built a Rat Park. In the Rat Park, rats had colored balls, rat-food, and tunnels to play along with other rats. There were also two kinds of water bottles; one was drugged water. It turns out most of the rats didn’t like the drugged water, and none of them died. The isolated rats, on the other hand, became heavy users of the drug. “What this taught me is that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety but rather connection. And that requires us to respond in a completely different way to addiction,” Johann Hari said. “Normally, we have an approach based on shame and stigma which says what we need to do is impose more suffering on people who got addiction problems. But actually, pain is the cause of addiction.” Understanding Depression And Anxiety Johann Hari says the cause of addiction is about not wanting to be present in your life because your life is too painful than its supposed to be. Furthermore, he explains that when we have a story about our pain, it structures our distress. “When your story begins to shift about that, and if you realize that depression and anxiety are not what you thought they were, that’s very destabilizing,” said Johann Hari. “It’s only if we accurately understand what is happening, that’s when we could find meaningful solutions.” In writing Chasing The Scream book, it took Johann Hari a journey of 30,000 miles around the world interviewing experts and looking into different cultures. Ultimately, he learned a lot. We misunderstood depression and anxiety as a culture, and we’ve ignored what the best research shows us.  Eye-opening Situation Johann Hari shares that in 2000, Portugal faced a severe situation. The country had one of the worse problems in Europe. For starters, 1% of the population was addicted to hero