Books written by Stanton Peele

Addiction-Proof Your Child (coming in August)

Stanton Peele

Will your kids drink or smoke marijuana? Quite possibly. But don’t panic. In a world where binge drinking, recreational and prescription drug abuse, chronic overeating and anorexia, and internet gambling and pornography are all too common among teens, it’s time to rethink conventional wisdom about addiction. We clearly need something more than “just say no.” This book is the alternative.

7 Tools to Beat Addiction

Stanton Peele

Once again, Dr. Stanton Peele confronts the sacred cows of the addiction / recovery industry with a new book that shows how to overcome addiction with or without treatment. In 7 Tools to Beat Addiction, Peele liberates readers from the disease model of addiction and presents a program for recovery based on his thoroughly grounded and sane perspective on the nature of addictions of all kinds.

Resisting 12-Step Coercion: How to Fight Forced Participation in AA, NA, or 12-Step Treatment

Stanton Peele & Charles Bufe with Archie Brodsky

Stanton and his colleagues respond to the overwhelming use of coercive referrals to substance abuse treatment (read "12-step treatment") in the United States with a primer on the legal, ethical, and clinical aspects of such treatment. The authors find that the empirical basis for claims that 12-step treatment is useful is weak at best. Important research has found no benefits — or even negative results — from assignment to AA and related treatments, and certainly other treatments are at least as effective. Moreover, a personal resolution to participate in a particular treatment is an important component in effective therapy.

The Truth about Addiction and Recovery

Stanton Peele & Archie Brodsky with Mary Arnold

In this revolutionary analysis of addiction, Stanton and Archie Brodsky draw on years of research to refute the contention that addictions are biologically based diseases that last a lifetime. Examining addiction within the context of people's lives, they show that addictive behavior is a way of coping with situational stress — and that it can be overcome without medical treatment or 12-step groups.

The Meaning of Addiction - An Unconventional View

Stanton Peele

The Meaning of Addiction presents an entire non-reductive, experiential model of addiction. It became a major nondisease text, including use at Harvard. Dr. Margaret Bean-Bayog (who surrendered her medical license in a case involving the suicide of a patient who had in his possession sado-masochistic sexual fantasies Bean-Bayog had written) said the book "worried" her in a review in the New England Journal of Medicine and asked for people who felt the same way to contact her.

Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control

Stanton Peele

A popular book explaining the movement in America toward disease theories of behaviors and their negative consequences for law, morality, and social and individual health. Widely reviewed, largely positively, including JAMA, Health Affairs, American Health, Psychology Today, Psychiatric News, and JSA..

Love and Addiction

Stanton Peele with Archie Brodsky

This was the first full-length book to describe addictive properties of love, and of non drug experiences generally. It quickly became a classic reference. It presents the underlying model of addiction to an experience which provides a unifying way of viewing drug, gambling, love and other addictions. This book was mass-marketed and excerpted in Cosmopolitan, as well as being excerpted in Classic Contributions in the Addictions, a graduate text at Harvard Medical School. Fifteen years after its publication, during the heat of the codependence movement, The Nation reviewed L&A as the best book on the subject.

Alcohol and Pleasure: A Health Perspective

Stanton Peele & Marcus Grant (Eds.)

People consume alcohol for pleasure in most cases, and in the large majority of cases, drinking is experienced as pleasurable. This edited volume covers a range of implications of this truth about drinking – cultural variations of the meaning of pleasure, American attitudes towards it, the relationship of pleasure (and drinking) to psychological and physical health, the policy implications of pleasure (for example, in terms of quality of life), how pleasure in drinking impacts drinking problems and their avoidance, and other topics.

How much is too much: Healthy habits or destructive addictions

Stanton Peele

In this book, Stanton elaborates on the criteria and meaning of addiction to an experience, describing how the person, situation, and substance (experience) interact to lead to addictive attachments. Stanton deals with a number of complexities, such as differentiating intense positive experiences from addictions, how to create a positive balance in life in terms of people’s habits, and raising non-addicted children.

The Science of Experience: A Direction for Psychology

Stanton Peele

In this book, Stanton presents the reasoned and empirical basis for a psychology that exists beyond neurochemical impulses – the idea that psychology is an emergent reality that stands, and must be analyzed and understood, on its own terms. Without such an analysis we can never come to the wellsprings of human behavior.

Visions of Addiction: Major Contemporary Perspectives on Addiction and Alcoholism

Stanton Peele (Ed.)

Visions presents the major dimensions of addiction theory in terms of the various perspectives that contribute to its understanding – including neurochemical, genetic, pharmacological, learning, peer group, ego psychology, disease and other views presented by leading theorists and researchers in the field.

Promoting Self-Change from Problem Substance Use: Practical Implications for Policy, Prevention and Treatment

Klingemann, H., Sobell, L., Peele, S., et al. (Eds.)

Growing out of a conference of the leading researchers on natural remission from around the world, this volume presents the data on, ideas about, and simple fact of natural change, and then extends this to detailed prevention and treatment policies built on people’s ample ability to change on their own. For example, it presents the counterpoint to the idea that informing people that addictions (from cigarettes to heroin) are diseases, on the grounds that this will cause them to seek treatment; rather, it is important to publicize how many people quit these attachments on their own, which is both motivating and empowering.

© Copyright 1996-2008 Stanton Peele. All rights reserved.
The opinions contained on this website are Stanton Peele's and in no way reflect those of the financial supporters of the website. Stanton Peele does not necessarily approve of any of the products or treatment programs advertised at this website. All material provided on the Stanton Peele Addiction Website is provided for informational or educational purposes only. Stanton Peele cannot provide individual clinical or therapy recommendations for persons consulting this site unless they have specifically retained Stanton for this purpose and he addresses them individually. Consult a licensed therapist or physician regarding the applicability of any opinions or recommendations with respect to your problems or medical condition.
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