Physician and author Carl Erik Fisher on the history of addiction and the capacity for recovery

Episode notes

Physician and author Carl Erik Fisher is both a doctor who specializes in addiction treatment and a person who is very public about his own struggles with substance use, who is currently in recovery himself. With his highly praised book The Urge: Our History of Addiction , Dr. Fisher embarks on a feverish search for answers to age-old questions: What does it mean to struggle with addiction? Why is it so difficult to move away from substance use, even once it has turned destructive? Who is vulnerable to addiction and who is capable of recovery? Tune in as Elizabeth sits down with Dr. Fisher to discuss the human capacity for recovery, the institutionalized stigma surrounding substance use disorders, the “double-edged sword” of labeling addiction as a disease, and how recovery took him from Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward to an assistant professorship in the department of psychiatry at Columbia University.

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