Dr. Sarah Wakeman
speaker
484 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Sarah Wakeman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So when we think about prevention for children, you know, often people have looked at like education, like, you know, telling people, telling kids that drugs are bad, that doesn't work. What does work is actually building resilience among young people. So building resilience, building connection. So what does that look like? That looks like affordable housing.
That looks like parks where people can get outside and play sports and exercise and build relationships. That looks like supporting families so that families can stay together. And so those early relationships and attachment can be well-formed.
That's like the true prevention work is trying to break the cycles of intergenerational trauma, poverty, substance use, and actually supporting families, communities at the very start.
Yes. Yeah, Rat Park is a great example of that.
Yeah, so Rat Park was a series of experiments that were done where essentially they took, they're trying to understand kind of drivers of addiction using rat models. And so they took rats and they had one model where rats were isolated in their own cage with nothing to do and no human connection.
And they had access to a substance like morphine or cocaine where they could push a lever and get more of it. And those animals, when they were deprived of connection and isolation, anything to do, used more of the drug. It gave them relief. It gave them pleasure.
They took those same animals and they put them in this amazing cage with, you know, areas to play and like wheels to climb on and lots of friends and other rats. And all of a sudden they saw the same animals were no longer kind of pushing the lever and trying to get more of the drug.
And so, you know, it's a somewhat simplified model that there's lots of – it's probably oversimplified, but it demonstrates that so much of addiction really is around this idea of connection, restoring sort of the world around us, the community, the interrelatedness that we all have, the opportunities and purpose and meaning and hope. So I think that's the real prevention.
And then there's how do we actually address folks who are having a problem? Yeah. And I think, you know, what I would do there is first make addiction treatment widely available immediately when people need it.
So the minute you walk into your general practitioner's office or an emergency room, you get treated with compassion, with science, with people asking you what can they do to help and offering you effective care the same way they would if you had a new cancer diagnosis or a new diagnosis of a heart problem.
And then we really reframe treatment entirely to look like the way it looks for any other health condition.
And that we stop punishing people who use substances where, you know, a lot of times people are still sent to jail for substance use, which, you know, is a confusing mixed message if we're saying this is a health problem on the one hand, but we're going to put you in prison or jail at the same time. Those two things don't necessarily align.
I mean, I don't think human beings were meant to live this way, and it's a relatively new thing, right? We often lived in a village or a community. We lived in these multigenerational households.
I mean, I have little kids, and I think having kids was such an eye-opener of that of like, well, that makes sense why people live with their parents and their grandparents and have these big families to create, you know, community and a sort of extended family around you. And we have lost that in a lot of ways.
And I think the ways that we used to get that, like religion, maybe that still resonates for some people. For others, it may not. And so finding other ways of engagement, of meaning, of purpose, that can be through lots of different things. You know, I think people are finding creative ways of doing that. It can be through, like...
You know, finding a volunteer activity, finding some other type of social group. Some people do it through sports. You know, they find connection and engagement with people they don't really know over the shared love around an activity or a team. But really sort of seeing that as a priority the same way you'd prioritize other things in your life and your health.
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the problems is that too often therapy has been like forced on people. I think that I'm much more of the approach of like we need to make treatment available and welcoming and high quality so that people get value out of it. And therapy is a huge part of that. You know, it's about a lot of things. It's about connection.
It's about figuring out those reasons why people are using in the first place, addressing and healing those traumas. It also matters that we have good, well-trained, empathetic therapists. So there's been a lot of interesting studies looking at actually how empathetic your therapist is is probably the strongest predictor of whether you make changes to your alcohol or drug use.
Which is so interesting because we often think like, You've probably heard someone say, like, I don't really like my therapist. And I think someone's reaction to that is like, oh, like, you're not that into therapy. But they've actually done a lot of studies showing that a therapist who is less empathetic, their client is more likely to use more substances at the end of that course of treatment.
So actually having a really well-trained, compassionate, evidence-based workforce is hugely important, too.
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