Andrea King, University of Chicago – Questioning the Dark Side of Addiction

Our understanding of alcohol addiction may need a re-write.

Andrea King, professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago, tells us why.

Andrea King is a clinical and research psychologist with expertise in addictive disorders, including alcohol use disorder.

Questioning the Dark Side of Addiction

There is a long-held belief that many people drink large amounts of alcohol to self-medicate and reduce negative feelings. In other words, they seek alcohol and consume large quantities to take away the bad feelings and forget their troubles.

But new research conducted by my team challenges that notion and some leading theories on the development of addiction.

We followed a group of 232 people across the U.S. between the ages of 21 and 35. Half of the group met the criteria for alcohol use disorder, or alcoholism. Half of the group had also experienced depression in the past year.

These participants reported on their mood states on our smartphone app during a typical alcohol drinking episode. It turns out that  people with alcohol use disorder and depression had the same high sensitivity to alcohol’s positive and rewarding effects as  those without depression. And these pleasurable alcohol effects were much more pronounced than in lighter drinkers.

This calls into question the supposed “dark side of addiction,” as proposed  in the predominant theory in our field – that people shift from drinking for pleasure to drinking to avoid withdrawal and negative mood.  In this study, and in our longitudinal work, we see that drinking alcohol to intoxication is related more to heightened positive effects rather than a dampening of negative states.

Our findings suggest that we may be focusing on the wrong target when we treat people with both alcohol use disorder and depression. We often focus on resolving stress and symptoms of depression, but that is only one side of the coin if we don’t also address the heightened rewarding effects that they experience from alcohol. No matter what your emotional state, we see that alcohol still exerts a powerful force on the pleasure centers of the brain.

Read More:

1. Press release: https://biologicalsciences.uchicago.edu/news/alcohol-depression-study
2. New Study: https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.20240069
3. Related research: https://www.uchicagomedicine.org/forefront/research-and-discoveries-articles/people-with-alcohol-use-disorder-impaired-after-heavy-drinking-despite-claims-of-higher-tolerance