Psychology Colloquium: An allostatic perspective on opioid addiction

Speaker

Bryce Huebner, Ph.D

Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor

Department of Philosophy

Georgetown University

Title

An allostatic perspective on opioid addiction

Abstract

This talk will distill some of the key arguments from a book that I am currently completing with Jay Schulkin. The aim of our book is to clarify some of the complex interactions between biology and culture that shape the human engagement with opioids. That’s a complicated story. So in this talk, I will focus primarily on questions of agency and autonomy, drawing on our account of the biological, psychological, and social constraints that shape human experience and behavior. In clarifying this perspective, I want to make it clear that the forms of experience and behavior that are associated with addiction are best understood as attempts to preserve viability in response to physiological and social challenges. I also want to unsettle the assumptions that have led many people to claim that addiction is a brain disease, and to suggest that it is a way that decision-making is hijacked by an out of control reward system.