Welcome to Rat Park

Hi. I’m Carl Erik Fisher, an addiction psychiatrist, writer, Columbia University bioethicist, and person in recovery.

We are living through an addiction crisis that demands both urgent action and deeper understanding. From devastating overdose deaths to our daily struggles with screens, from the growth of addiction supply industries to the timeless struggles with money, power, status, and the self, addiction touches us all. Yet our usual, oversimplified ways of thinking about it fall short. This newsletter creates space for a richer conversation about addiction and recovery, one that draws from history, science, clinical practice, and lived experience to seek practical wisdom for healing and flourishing.

Not too long ago, I wrote a book—The Urge: Our History of Addiction—as a way to make some sense of addiction for my family, my patients, and myself. The Urge focused largely on understanding, but I felt like it only scratched the surface of what is commonly called recovery and the ways that addiction is in all of us. Since the book came out, I’ve spoken to various audiences grappling with addiction, and I feel so acutely the historic crisis we are in.

My goal is to explore these complexities honestly and humbly, working to understand both the universal patterns of addiction and the deeply personal paths of recovery—pointing us toward genuine healing and growth.

What to expect

This newsletter is an experiment and an exercise in sharing provisional, off-the-cuff work. I want this to be open-ended and interactive, so you may see different formats:

• new episodes of my interview podcast, Flourishing After Addiction;

• longer-form posts;

• summaries and updates about my academic work;

• behind-the-scenes info and works in progress;

• more explicitly practical resources, tools, and insights from my psychotherapy practice;

• curated links and reads; and

• guest posts.

As both a doctor and someone in recovery, I seek to explore nuanced, pragmatic, pluralistic, and humanistic (i.e., whole-person) accounts of addiction. I resist the divisive binaries of us/them, healthy/disordered, or normal/diseased. I see medical science as immensely useful and fascinating, and also just one of many ways to make sense of the world. My commitment is to seek out what is truly helpful across fields like science, philosophy, and spirituality, even while respecting those disciplines’ limitations. I see addiction as a universal human phenomenon that reflects some of the most important and fascinating questions about all of human life, thought, and action.

Bottom line, I plan to use this Substack to share what I’m working through myself as a psychiatrist and as a person in recovery. I want Rat Park to be a space for learning, showing my work, inviting feedback, and hearing from you, so I hope you read, comment, and let me know what you think.

You can always write me directly to share your thoughts and experiences: please email carlerikfisher@substack.com or use the contact form on my website: click here.

Subscriptions

This newsletter exists thanks to paid subscribers who make this work possible. If you appreciate this work, please consider a paid subscription or gifting one to others. It really does help to keep it going.

Nothing will be behind a paywall for now. Access to this information is important to me, and writing this newsletter and producing my podcast is immensely gratifying. And, it does take a lot of work, so if you do choose to contribute, I’ll be grateful.

Another great way to help is to share with a friend!

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About me

My book, The Urge: Our History of Addiction, was published by Penguin Press in January 2022 and named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker and The Boston Globe. I’m an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University. I regularly teach, consult, and give talks about understanding addiction and recovery. I maintain a small, psychotherapy-focused clinical practice and am particularly interested in applying the evolving science of mindfulness, meditation, and other contemplative practices to addiction and recovery. Also published to this newsletter, I host the podcast “Flourishing After Addiction,” featuring deep-dive interviews with researchers, clinicians, writers, spiritual teachers, philosophers, and others who are working at the forefront of addiction and recovery.

All of my work is oriented toward giving my patients, students, readers, and listeners what I still want for myself and what is still very much a work in progress: finding some freedom from addictive cycles, developing ways of working with our pain, and going beyond stopping use to transformational change and thriving in recovery.

Disclosures

This is my personal site; the content here, including my podcast and blog, represent my views alone.

The information found here or on any other online presence, including www.carlerikfisher.com, is for informational purposes only. It isn't medical or clinical advice, and it isn’t a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you have questions, please consult a medical professional.

Why Rat Park?

I go into some detail about this in my first post. The upshot is, “Rat Park” was a series of behavioral experiments conducted in the late 1970s to early ’80s by psychologist Bruce Alexander and colleagues. It’s significant both for its findings and how it has been adopted into the culture.1

In traditional animal models, you can “addict” a rodent in a cage to drugs like morphine or cocaine, in the sense that it will self-administer drugs even to the point of harm. Alexander, however, noted that rats are social and sexual creatures that don’t normally live in little isolated cages. He created an “enriched environment” with much more space, opportunities to play and mate, and even fun little pine trees drawn on the walls, and he measured how living in “Rat Park” compared to the usual housing affected morphine consumption.

Sure enough, Alexander and colleagues found that rats in the enriched environment drank less morphine. Their conclusions were restrained, explicitly warning against “over-simplification.” Cue a torrent of oversimplifications. Sometimes the implications are that alienation, dislocation, or pain are the sole, meaningful causes of addiction. There are also some interesting wrinkles about whether the experiment was properly replicated, what constitutes an experimental replication, the difference between “replication” and “validation,” and whether addiction is necessarily a human phenomenon.

And yet, a lot of good came from the Rat Park story. It has helped to shift the focus from solely biological causes and individual determinants of addiction toward a broader understanding—especially important in the context of anti-drug propaganda, a hyperindividualistic culture, and general ignorance about addiction. It’s useful to remember that we’re not alone in our battles against cravings. We’re all still on the addiction spectrum. We all need some variety of recovery, our own rat parks. When we stray away from our parks, or fail to build them, we run into problems.

So I want to be clear that my intention is to honor Rat Park and what it stands for: the need to look beyond the individual, essential, biological understandings of addiction, but also the difficulty in studying the complicated phenomena of addiction and recovery in the first place. It symbolizes the competing meanings, interpretations, and uses of ideas about addiction and recovery. The terrible difficulty of understanding addiction and the absolute necessity for interdisciplinary explorations. The tension between putting knowledge to work—to try to do something to help our addiction crisis—and the need for humility. The necessity of doing this work in provisional way but still to do it.