Banning alcohol sports sponsorship will mean a big drop in harm
In August 2022, Green Party MP Chlöe Swarbrick’s bill to restrict alcohol advertising and sports sponsorship presented an opportunity to do something meaningful, at last, about the harms alcohol inflicts in our communities. I have been researching the effects of...
Rethinking addiction in terms of social connections
Addiction is often seen as some form of attribute or condition belonging to an individual person and produced by a complex interaction of that person’s body and mind. I see it differently. I see addiction as primarily a social event, and, through the metaphor of an...
What happens when addiction practitioners in recovery relapse?
The presence of practitioners in recovery from their own addiction as members of teams working with addictions has a critical value in developing service effectiveness. From the point of view of clients coming to a service, the visible presence of recovering...
How to navigate tensions between different ways of addressing problems with alcohol and drugs
Our responses to problems associated with alcohol and drugs are typically informed by three quite different traditions of thinking; traditions which bump up regularly against each other like large tectonic plates, crunching and grinding, leading at times to tremors...
Advantages in approaching addiction as a social event
A common way of thinking about the ‘self’ is to see it primarily as an individual object and that this object—or particle—is the appropriate focal point for understanding addiction. Indeed, there are several ways I can view myself as a particle. I am certainly a...
Addictions are powerful and perplexing
The power of addictive processes are difficult to make sense of. I recall during my early years as a clinical psychologist being asked by hospital staff to speak with a 32-year-old man addicted to alcohol who was being discharged following treatment for...
The Scot’s alcohol legislation finally made it
The most interesting aspect of the Scottish change in alcohol legislation on May 2018 is how long it took to implement its new policy. The story tracks back twelve years ago to rising public concerns in Scotland about increasing levels of drinking and...
Addictions only partially intersect with mental health
On January 24, 2018, the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, announced Labour’s promised government inquiry into mental health and addiction services and on November 28 the report, He Ara Oranga, was released. The whole process was good news for mental health field...
Influence of unhealthy commodity industries on governments
Why, over the last fifty years, have successive governments in New Zealand, like their counterparts overseas, consistently favoured less effective interventions for tobacco, alcohol, gambling and unhealthy food and beverages over what research indicates are more...