Carl Erik Fisher, M.D., is an addiction psychiatrist, bioethics scholar, author, and person in recovery. He is an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, where he studies and teaches law, ethics, and policy relating to psychiatry and neuroscience, especially issues related to substance use disorders and other addictive behaviors. He also maintains a private clinical practice focused on complementary and integrative approaches to addiction and recovery.
He is the author of the nonfiction book The Urge: Our History of Addiction, named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker and The Boston Globe. The Urge is an intellectual and cultural history of addiction, interwoven with his own experiences as an addiction psychiatrist at Columbia and as someone in recovery himself. His other writing for the general public has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Slate, Scientific American MIND, and elsewhere. He is also the host of the podcast Flourishing After Addiction, an interview series focused on addiction and recovery.
Carl’s scholarly work addresses the role of neuroscience and psychiatry in society, primarily as reflected in ethics, law, and policy. His academic writing has been published in JAMA; The American Journal of Bioethics; The Journal of Medical Ethics; and The Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, among others. He is a fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, and he is an appointed member of the American Psychiatric Association’s Council on Psychiatry and Law.
In this episode:
- Shares his personal and professional journey
- Why it was important for him that his book focus on the history of addiction
- Can and should personal recovery inform professional treatment?
- Why he believes if you can do so safely, you should recover out loud
- Why he wrote the book The Urge: Our History of Addiction
- What are his thoughts on models of addiction?
- Is there a false dichotomy between harm reduction and abstinence-based treatment?
- He addresses some common misconceptions about addiction
- Dr. Fisher turns the tables and walks Vera & I through an exercise to see how our treatment are more aligned than different
- What he would say to his younger self about addiction
