Overcoming Addiction Summary

Addiction is a problem that has ramifications not only for the addict but also for his/her loved ones. The article’s main point is to explain how humans respond to operant conditioning, and how it could be applied to overcome addiction. This article mostly focuses on the idea that addiction is the result of our desire for rewards, and since drugs offer an almost immediate reward the brain learns to associate drugs with rewards. This starts a downward spiral where regular healthy reward seeking behavior is replaced by the fast reward response drugs offer, and eventually drugs replace all other means of reward seeking behavior creating a dependency. The article displays how operant conditioning is used to replace the dependency of drugs with

To exploit this primal instinct psychologist have developed many different techniques such as reward schedules, and proportion of reward given for a desired behavior. The techniques have been used to fight off addiction, and since addiction is a learned behavior operant conditioning has been found to be very helpful to overcome it. Although rewards are a big part on overcoming addiction, punishments are also effective ways to stop addiction. But punishment is specific to early stages of addiction, when a strong punishment is enough to stop an addict from doing the undesired behavior. In the more advanced addiction stages only rewards have been found to be helpful, and in this article the author explains a specific therapy that uses operant conditioning as means of replacing the immediate reward addictive drugs/behavior offer to other more healthier rewards. The therapy is called CRAFT, and stands for community reinforcement and family training. This therapy relies on the addict’s family and loved one to administer rewards for healthy behaviors, and by doing so it would remove the desire of the addict to seek out other types of rewards. Thus, the main point of the article is to express the idea that addicts should only experience punishment by a last resort. Instead they should be demonstrated that their addiction is not their only mean to get reward, and that there are healthier ways to get rewards that perhaps are even more