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Mental Health for the Masses
Ricardo Muñoz thinks that MOOCs get a bad rap. MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Courses, Internet-based higher education available to anyone in the world, regardless of age or qualifications, and usually for free. MOOCs
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How a Habit Becomes an Addiction
Research suggests that only 20–30% of drug users actually descend into addiction — defined as the persistent seeking and taking of drugs even in the face of dire personal consequences. Why are some people who
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What Heroin Addiction Tells Us About Changing Bad Habits
NPR: It’s a tradition as old as New Year’s: making resolutions. We will not smoke, or sojourn with the bucket of mint chocolate chip. In fact, we will resist sweets generally, including the bowl of
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Smoke Signals
More than 2.5 million Americans have died from smoking without ever having picked up a smoking habit. They just happened to live or work with someone who did. That’s according to a report from the
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Is Internet Addiction a Real Thing?
The New Yorker: Marc Potenza, a psychiatrist at Yale and the director of the school’s Program for Research on Impulsivity and Impulse Control Disorders, has been treating addiction for more than two decades. Early in
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Different Roads, Same Reward
When addiction research was in its infancy roughly a century ago, scientists dismissed substance abuse as a mere personality flaw. Today, addiction is widely thought to be due to complex gene–environment interactions influencing brain function