Book Review: "Dopamine Nation" by Dr Anna Lembke

I found this book whilst reading a book called ‘Bad Therapy’ by Abigail Shrier (which I loved, thank you for asking) and I thought it sounded pretty interesting to begin with. No, it is not a perfect book and in some ways I can actually see how this book is probably not as great as advertised. There were not many reviews I could read and a lot of it is based on personal experience rather than actual data. Be that as it may, it is still an interesting read in the day and age of dopamine chasing and constant requirement for stimuli. Even though some of the reading might be almost obvious and some of the comments about ‘mindfulness’ actually working seem patronising to the reader, this is still a book with slightly more positives than negatives.

Let’s start with an advantage to begin with which is that this book goes over how everyone in the modern day has some sort of behaviour where there is routine. Something that is fuelled by a dopamine reaction becomes ingrained into the very fabrics of our lives. However, it also covers how the modern day gives us an excuse for being addicted to these dopamine-enhanced behaviours. It compares various addictions no matter how terrifying or banal they seem and yet, states how similar they are in the brain and how the brain actually processes them all in roughly the same way. The balance of pleasure and pain is a metaphor that is important to understanding how this all works and the author discusses the different types of addiction through various means.

One of those means is through anecdotes. There are many anecdotes of different patients addicted to different things and this tends to help the author to tell the story of how addiction can destroy the lives of the people addicted to the substance not just through the ruining of health, but the changing of brain chemistry. The modern day has an “overwhelming abundance” of “drugs of choice” and everyone is addicted to something they get pleasure from. This then, according to the author, turns into addiction when the person quashes every single instance of pain or inconvenience with their “drug of choice”, using it again and again.

Another thing that I found pretty interesting was the way the author gives us some techniques that therapists use to get information out of you (very informative for those of us who have been sent to therapy by others and don’t wish to chat about our lives). One of those methods is to hone in on seemingly unimportant things to get someone to tell the therapist about their day to day lives. I thought this was a real giveaway to those of us who have been in therapy before who didn’t want to be. I think I speak for all of us when I say that whenever we are sent back, we thank you dearly for telling us about these techniques so that we can avoid them.

There are some disadvantages of this book as well. The first one is that for a very long time, this book seems to explain the absolute obvious. I think that there are many things in this book that deals with information that is not only readily available but mostly well-known (and in very many cases, doesn’t even work as a solution). A lot of it is very much the same thing that anyone who has been to one therapy session has learned or even those of us who are online and searching up ‘mindfulness’ pages. Which leads us on to the next problem: a therapist who sees mindfulness as an objective solution is not someone I would want treating me since it has actually been disproven to work. I get it, there’s two problems here but it moves us on to the next one.

Another problem is that she talks about her own addiction as being comparable to others even though her's is an addiction to trashy romance novels and others have an addiction to drugs and things that can actually kill them. Though I understand she is analysing addictive behaviours, these are two things that are laughably incomparable in the real world. The one that can kill you has very severe consequences whereas, an addiction to trashy romance novels will at best be somewhat a mentally deficient distraction from the real world.

Though I understand the study she is doing, there are many different opinions I had of this book along with: it is based a lot on personal opinion and anecdotes rather than actual data (which is sporadic), I’m not actually convinced that the conversation with the patient ‘Delilah’ actually happened as she seemed like a cliché composite of teenage pot-users rather than a real human being and finally, there are a lot of repetitive facts. However, there are more positives in this book: the author outlines that there are many, many different reasons for addiction and lots of them often go overlooked in mainstream addiction therapy, there is a lack of judgement about addiction and the addict’s lifestyle and finally, everyone is primed for addiction in the modern day.