Customer Reviews

Assessment of Addictive Behaviors, Second Edition

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Assessment of Addictive Behaviors provides cogent and comprehensive coverage of what is now known to be crucial in understanding and treatment of addiction; namely, assessment of the biological, psychological, and sociocultural contributors to the addictive process.

This work offers an integrated biopsychosocial orientation that is as sensitive to the latest areas of addictions that are on the rise (e.g., gambling and sexual risk behavior) as it is to ethnocultural issues.

Clinicians, upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, and researchers will find this text to be an invaluable resource in their quest to understand and evaluate the complexities of addictive processes.

...it doesn't go that far. Which is a little bit surprising given the year of publication. I agree with pretty much everything Mr. Rubino had to say, but in the age of the mindfulness-based cognitive therapies =and= neuropsychology, there's a lot more that =could= have been said in 2005.

As was the case with my reading of Marlatt & Donovan's companion volume, =Relapse Prevention, Second Edition=, I came away from this book similarly disposed to believe that addiction treatment appears to be dominated by MSW's and DSW's rather than MFT's and Psy.D's. Which means a psychophilosophical =and= empirical research chains that are quite different in the progression of therapeutic technology.

Most of the listed assessments are out of the Clinical Ph.D. tradition, which is common to both "school," but the notions of how to =employ= those assessments reflects a grasp of cognitive behavioral therapies that's about vintage 1990-95.

If one is looking merely for a collection of addiction-specific assessment tools, this =will= be more than satisfactory. But if one was really trying to understand addiction as a collection of traits with well-understood etiological underpinnings and common -- if multiple and diverse -- routes to recovery, I can't recommend either of these two books.

But I can recommend the chapters on gambling addiction in =both= of them as starting points into the beginnings of Howard Shaffer's notions that all forms of addiction operate on a single biopsychosocial platform. And that said platform is one of unprocessed developmental deficits + familial and cultural damage to inherent cognitive capacities + excitotoxicity in the autonomic cortisol as well as mesolimbic dopamine chains.

For those two articles alone, one might do oneself a favor and bag used copies of both books... because as far down the road to a unified field theory of addiction as Shaffer was when he published his own books in the '80s, he hadn't yet come to some of the suggestions made here.

Now, all that said, if one understands the common psychodynamic, social learning, core-belief-to-current-appraisal cognitive, and neurobiological operations found in =all= addictions, both of these books can be quite edifying. Because they will fill in a lot of the blank spots about addictions that specialists in typically co-morbid diagnoses like cluster B personality disorders may not know about. For =that=, these two books are terrific.

But the failure among all but one of the authors of the nearly 20 articles in both books published c. 2005 to understand addiction recovery as the development of skills for mindfulness, critical thinking, distress tolerance and emotion regulation of the upshots of neuroplastic remodeling dismays me.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy, the current industry standard for addiction recovery isn't even in the index here, although it is discussed in one of the articles in each of the two books. And neither Acceptance & Commitment nor Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy are mentioned at all. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Oh, well.