We live in an addiction-filled society. Celebrities and socialites are in and out of rehab, and the news, each week. We all have stories of our friend who compulsively overeats; our mother’s online shopping habit; the smoker; the drinker. Less ubiquitous are answers to the questions that accompany addiction, for the addict’s friends, family and caregivers: why can’t they just stop? Is it really a disease? Why does medicine help some and not others? Is AA the answer, or is medicine the only cure?

Trapped between the conflicting tenets of twelve-step groups and academia, and the media’s exaggerated promises of a “cure,” it is nearly impossible for those on the outside to understand what an addict is going through. Options for treatment are varied and often conflicting. Finding a clear path through recovery seems to be getting harder as more information becomes available, not simpler.

Richard S. Sandor, M.D., provides a straightforward solution in Thinking Simply About Addiction:  A Handbook for Recovery (Tarcher/Penguin paperback; on sale March 5, 2009; $14.95). Combining the findings of modern medical science with the abstinence approach of Alcoholics Anonymous, this book provides a clear picture—and pathway—of recovery both for addicts and for their friends and family members.

By rethinking the disease concept of addiction, Dr. Sandor explains what the media and even treatment professionals may miss, but is abundantly clear to addicts themselves: the experience of powerlessness is the experience of the addiction having a life of its own, a life that can be made dormant, but which cannot be eliminated. This is among the reasons, as Dr. Sandor explains, why abstinence is the foundation of recovery – and why treatment cannot stop there. He carefully and nondogmatically explores why a spiritual awakening – one of the most controversial and widely resisted aspects of the 12-step approach – is a necessary element for long term recovery from addiction.

The book’s four chapters illuminate these points by each addressing a key question:

1. Is addiction a disease?

     Answer: Yes, addictions are diseases. Specifically, they are disorders of automaticity.

2. Why me?

     Answer: Why not you? To be human is to be susceptible to addiction, though some people are more susceptible to addictions than to others.

3. Does treatment “work”?

     Answer: Work on its own? No. The idea that treatment can “work,” while the alcoholic or addict himself doesn’t, completely misses what recovery from addiction means.

4. Is a spiritual awakening necessary for recovery?

     Answer: And finally, yes, a spiritual awakening of some kind is necessary for recovery. For abstinence, no, but for recovery, yes.

Read Dr. Sandors Review of C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters  Here