Unbroken Brain

A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction

By: Maia Szalavitz

Narrated by: Marisa Vitali

More people than ever before see themselves as addicted to or recovering from addiction, whether it's alcohol or drugs, prescription meds, sex, gambling, porn, or the Internet. But despite the unprecedented attention, our understanding of addiction is trapped in unfounded 20th-century ideas, addiction as a crime or as brain disease, and equally outdated treatment.

Challenging both the idea of the addict's "broken brain" and the notion of a simple "addictive personality", Unbroken Brain offers a radical and groundbreaking new perspective, arguing that addiction is a learning disorder, and shows how seeing the condition this way can untangle our current debates over treatment, prevention, and policy. Like autistic traits, addictive behaviors fall on a spectrum - and they can be a normal response to an extreme situation. By illustrating what addiction is and is not, the book illustrates how timing, history, family, peers, culture, and chemicals come together to create both illness and recovery - and why there is no "addictive personality" or single treatment that works for all.

Combining Maia Szalavitz's personal story with a distillation of more than 25 years of science and research, Unbroken Brain provides a paradigm-shifting approach to thinking about addiction.

©2016 Maia Szalavitz (P)2016 Audible, Inc.

Sounds like narrator recorded one sentence per day.

I got through chapter 6 before deciding to buy the Kindle version and read this instead. I usually like audiobooks where the author does NOT read their own books, but after struggling through with a narrator whose voice sounds like a computer synthesis, very robotic, like one sentence was recorded at a time very distinctly with gaps between the recordings, I just can't take it anymore.

The writing itself is fantastic, the material is very well written. The narrator just completely sucks. She has a beautiful voice, but her diction style is one of the worst I've heard, and I have listened to half of many badly narrated audiobooks. Way too robotic and stilted and overly melodic in a formulaic manner.

profound work on really treating addiction

addiction treatment via the 12 steps does not work for anything other than alcohol. this is obvious to anyone who reads about the heroin addict who overdoses and dies after 4, 8, or 20 rehabs. if rehab worked, that addict would be alive today.

Excellent, poignant and easy to grasp

This book has been eye opening, I highly recommend it to anyone seeking guidance in how to speak with/comfort/understand a loved one in addiction. I hope that our society begins to view drugs and addiction and addicts in this way!

a call to action

loved the validation and researched expressions of how harm reduction models work! i will be recommending to all I work with at the Addiction recovery center where I work in Maine. Thank you Maia, I appreciate your brave work.

Enlightening

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Through the course of the book I thought about many different people in my life that I felt could seriously benefit from this book, so YES! And I already have.

What did you like best about this story?

I really liked how the author intertwined her experiences with data, experiments, studies, etc. and challenged the “conventional” way addiction and how those addicted are treated.

What about Marisa Vitali’s performance did you like?

She spoke in a way that made me feel as though I was in a personal conversation with the author.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No. I drive a lot for work and listened primarily in my car, so it took me a bit over a week to finish it.

Any additional comments?

THANK YOU Maia Szalavitz for writing this book!

great read

Excellence reading performance. I really enjoyed the new perspective on addiction as a psychological issue, and felt that many excellent points and recommendations were made. It was a little anecdotal that the author used he own story so strongly to make her points, but it was also backed with a lot of valid research that mostlymade up for it. Overall, a good experience.

Revolutionary

The book purports, among other things, that addiction is a learning disorder. Further, if the premise is correct then the assumption that jail time never cured an addict is correct. Addicts need love, support and medical attention just like any other medical problem. You cannot punish an addict back to health.

Must read to begin to understand addiction

As a medical doctor, I have struggled with the current approach to addiction treatment. This book lays out a more rational approach and that I hope we will increasingly adopt. I see opportunities for incorporating a rational approach within my own practice, although this is a new frontier and will certainly take time, energy, and courage.

A compassionate approach to substance learning

One of the better books I’ve found to help approach a modern narrative to addiction and recovery. Phenomenal book.

Exceptionally Repetitive

Overall, the content was good, but this book was so repetitive that it could have been written with a third of the text. The exact same points kept being brought up over and over and over again. The author really knows how to beat a dead horse. The reader is a little over the top in her pronunciation of Ts, buT you sorT of geT used to iT after a while.