A Harvard psychologist named Gene M. Heyman recently released the book, Addiction: A Disorder of Choice, which asserts that addiction isn’t really an illness. However, it really isn’t that surprising as Heyman is just one of the many who have previously posed this opinion.
The facts remain that nearly all health experts agree that addiction is a serious illness, which is not voluntarily chosen. Among such experts that disagree with the logic behind Addiction: A Disorder of Choice, is Norman Miller, professor of medicine at Michigan State University, who says: “These guys – I don’t know, academia, they just kind of take what they want, and they don’t care about the truth, or what the studies show.”
Tony George, the head of addiction psychiatry at the University of Toronto, further expounds upon this point, when he says the following about Gene M. Heyman’s hypothesis in the new book: “Where (Heyman) loses the argument is that there are clearly both biological and environmental or contextual factors involved, but he’s basically saying that the context and the environment are everything and the biology is irrelevant.”
