Addiction, Madness, Despair pt. 1: Addiction

07/07/21 • 64 min

As we emerge from quarantine and reveal to one another our many wounds, Arnold describes a recent, months-long period of psychological rupture as a narrative frame for an inquiry into the relationship between addiction, madness, despair and revolutionary social possibility. In this episode we examine the dubious origins of 12-steps programs like Alcoholics Anonymous in hallucinatory christianity, the neuroscience of addiction, and the relationship between addiction and pain. We also explore the fundamental unity of the changes to neural circuitry that result from exposure to drugs or exposure to all the other hyper-potent reward stimuli that consumer civilization has to offer.

Previous Episode

Heal Like An Animal: Interview with Joshua Sylvae pt. 3

In this episode, Arnold asks Joshua a series of truly fundamental questions to which no one has decisive answers: questions about whether large-scale shifts in how we conceptualize our suffering are possible, and whether and to what extent this would inform possibilities for a less destructive society. We discuss the role of narcissism in creating coercive political systems, trauma and psychological distress in traditional societies, the mythical dimensions of both individual and collective healing, and much more.

Next Episode

Addiction, Madness, Despair pt. 2: Madness

We examine the hopelessly subjective and highly contentious (one could perhaps say psychotic) process by which the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the so-called bible of psychiatric disorders, has been constructed. Relying heavily on Gary Greenberg's The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry, we also discuss the consequences the DSM has both for individuals who accept its narratives about the nature of their suffering and for the prospects for social transformation. Somewhere along the way, we talk about secret societies that exert control through claims to exclusive knowledge in traditional cultures, optical illusions that only occur among industrialized people, and the ways captive animals go insane.