The Urge:
our history of addiction
Overview
Millions of us suffer from addiction, including psychiatrist and recovering alcoholic Carl Erik Fisher. But where does this centuries-old behaviour come from and how should we treat it?
As a young doctor, Carl Erik Fisher came face to face with his own addiction crisis, one that nearly cost him everything. Now, in The Urge, he investigates the history of this condition; how we have struggled to define, treat, and control it; and how broader understanding and compassion could change people’s lives.
The Urge is at once an eye-opening history of ideas, a riveting personal story of addiction and recovery, and a clinician’s urgent call for a more expansive, nuanced view of one of society’s most intractable challenges.
Details
- Format
- Size
- Extent
- ISBN
- RRP
- Pub date
- Rights held
- Other rights
- Paperback
- 198mm x 129mm
- 400 pages
- 9781914484865
- GBP£10.99
- 12 January 2023
- UK & Commonwealth (ex. Can)
- The Gernert Company
Praise
‘Carl Erik Fisher takes the reader on a vivid tour over several thousand years of multiple cycles of science, medicine, and literature, woven together by the thread of the author’s own alcohol and amphetamine addiction and treatment. It is made even more emphatic and moving because he is also a psychiatrist who treats such patients … [The Urge] is thorough and revealing … [and is] a mature view of the topic from someone with immense experience of it.’
‘A compelling history … Fisher, an addiction physician and a recovering addict, illustrates the “terrifying breakdown of reason” that accompanies the condition by drawing on patients’ anecdotes and on his own experience.’
About the Author
Carl Erik Fisher is an addiction physician and bioethicist. He is an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, where he works in the Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry. He also maintains a private psychiatry practice focusing on complementary and integrative approaches to treating addiction. His writing has appeared in Nautilus, Slate, and Scientific American MIND, among other outlets. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his partner and son.
