Please join us on
February 18, 2022
at 9:00 AM
on ZOOM
Addiction and Recovery:
The Latest Findings from Neuroscience Research
1.5 CEU's
Course Description:
Research in neuroscience provides an evidence-based and comprehensive understanding of addiction that fits well with the experiences of people needing, seeking, and in recovery. There are several insightful and well-articulated arguments challenging the disease conceptualization of addiction, but two important areas of research –epigenetics and psychoneuroimmunology – greatly advance awareness of how environmental stress creates vulnerability to addiction. This lecture reviews the most up to-date science of addiction, the current arguments for and against addiction’s conceptualization as a disease, and how the principles of recovery management counter the pathophysiology of addiction and improve a recovering person’s chances of achieving long-term recovery.
Course Objectives:
At the end of this course, participants should be able to:
- Describe the latest neuroscientific explanations of substance use disorder pathophysiology and interpret Substance Use Disorder symptomology in light of this research.
- Describe and analyze the arguments for and against the conceptualization of addiction as a brain disease.
- Define psychoneuroimmunology and explain its connection to substance use disorder.
- Define social determinants of health and explain the role they play in vulnerability to substance use disorder.
presented by
Kevin McCauley, MD
Dr. Kevin McCauley is a Meadows Senior Fellow, joining the Meadows Behavioral Healthcare team in 2016. A 1992 graduate of Drexel University School of Medicine, he first became interested in the treatment of substance use disorders while serving as a Naval Flight Surgeon where he observed the U.S. Navy’s policy of treating addiction as a safety (not a moral) issue and returning treated pilots to flight status under careful monitoring.
After developing his own addiction to prescription opioids, however, Dr. McCauley was court-martialed and imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. There he read voraciously of what was known about the disease of addiction at that time. Today, he has over 15 years of continuous sobriety and has worked in a non-clinical capacity at several treatment centers, giving over 2,000 lectures on the neuroscience of addiction and recovery management. From 2004 to 2008, Dr. McCauley was Director of a level III Recovery Residence in Sandy, Utah, and the first president of the Utah Association for Recovery Residences.
Dr. McCauley wrote and directed two films: Memo to Self, about the concepts of recovery management, and Pleasure Unwoven, about the neuroscience of addiction, which won the 2010 Michael Q. Ford Award for Journalism from the National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers.
Kevin currently lives with his wife, Kristine, in Sedona, Arizona, where he is a graduate student at the University of Arizona School of Public Health.
(Members, you may use a quarterly coupon code as your FREE meeting for this period. Contact admin@sdnc-camft.org for code-if you do not have it.)
RECORDED SESSSION-TBA
