Marc David Lewis

Marc Lewis (born 1951) is a Canadian clinical psychologist, neuroscientist, academic, and author from Toronto, Ontario.

He was a professor at the University of Toronto from 1989 to 2010 and Radboud University Nijmegen in Nijmegen, the Netherlands from 2010 to 2016. He is particularly focused on the study of addiction. His work is informed by his own experience of drug addiction, and is notable for its focus on neuroscience and the changes addiction causes in the brain. His books include Memoirs of an Addicted Brain and The Biology of Desire, which Damian Thompson of The Spectator called "the most important study of addiction to be published for many years." He has argued that the standard view of addiction as a disease is misleading and even potentially harmful, suggesting instead that it is best viewed as a process of "deep learning."

He has also written or co-written more than 75 journal articles and chapters on developmental psychology, neuroscience, addiction and related topics.

Early life Lewis was born in 1951 and grew up in the York Mills neighborhood of Toronto in a middle-class Jewish family; his father was a doctor. He has a brother, Michael. His parents divorced in 1970. As a teenager, he attended Tabor Academy, a preparatory school in Massachusetts, but did not have a good experience there, becoming depressed and beginning his experimentation with drugs. By age 17, as a university student, he had begun using heroin.

Career

Teaching and research Lewis returned to graduate school at the University of Toronto, where he studied cognitive and emotional development, developmental (cognitive) neuroscience, as well as child-clinical psychology, as well as the neuroscience of addiction. He earned a master's degree in applied psychology in 1986, and a Ph.D. in 1989. His thesis supervisor was Robbie Case, a professor of developmental psychology. and became a full professor in 2000.

As a scientist, Lewis has specialized in researching the emotional development of children and adolescents and the questions of how and why the brain changes during addiction. His views have sometimes been controversial. He has been critical of 12-step programs, saying that although the programs are effective for some people, they tend not to teach the psychological skills, including emotion regulation, needed to reduce or eliminate addictive substance use after leaving. He argues that the disease model is often used to justify expensive but ineffective treatment by rehabilitation clinics, and encourages passivity, fatalism, and pessimism in those seeking treatment. and a conversation with the Dalai Lama at the Mind & Life Institute's 2013 conference on addiction in Dharamshala, India.

Books

The Biology of Desire Lewis' 2015 book The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease examines the neuroscience of addiction through in-depth case studies of five people living through addiction and recovery. The book is critical of the standard model of treating addiction as a disease. Instead, Lewis encourages the control or elimination of substance use and binge-eating disorders through self-sustaining personal empowerment and an understanding of the psychology and neurobiology of addiction.

The Biology of Desire received the PROSE award for Psychology from the Association of American Publishers in 2016.

Reviews of The Biology of Desire were largely positive. Kirkus Reviews called it a "intellectually authoritative yet controversial declaration that substance and behavioral dependencies are swiftly and deeply learned via the 'neural circuitry of desire.'" Richard Ferguson of The Sydney Morning Herald praised the book's "very readable" writing style, saying that its "success lies in its ability to communicate complex ideas in a way that will engage you and move you and sometimes make you laugh." Publishers Weekly agreed, saying "Even when presenting more technical information, Lewis shows a keen ability to put a human face on the most groundbreaking research into addiction."

Memoirs of an Addicted Brain Lewis' 2011 book Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines his Former Life on Drugs is a combination of traditional memoir and treatise on the neuroscience of drug addiction. Lewis alternates between stories from his own life and explanations of how drugs affect the neurochemistry of the brain, using his own experience with addiction to illuminate and humanize the science. The book was based on journals Lewis kept from age 17. Writing for recovery-focused website The Fix, reviewer Walter Armstrong said that the book "may be the most original and illuminating addiction memoir since Thomas De Quincey's seminal Confessions of an English Opium-Eater," saying that Lewis approached the topic of addiction with "supple intelligence and subtle style" and that Lewis' "unique perspective" as both an addict and a scientist made the book a standout in its genre "as over-the-top suspenseful as David Carr’s classic The Night of the Gun."

Other books With his wife Isabela Granic, he co-wrote the 2010 book Bedtiming: The Parent's Guide to Getting Your Child to Sleep at Just the Right Age, a guide for parents in training their young children in going to sleep at ages that work well, or not well, according to developmental stage theory. The book draws on both the couple's academic research and their experience as parents of twin boys. Kingston Whig-Standard reviewer Marilyn Linton noted that it is one of the few books on the topic to consider the importance of cognitive brain development. He has also written for The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times, Newsweek, Literary Review of Canada, Aeon, Scientific American, University of Toronto Magazine, The Scientist, The Guardian, Huffington Post, and Salon.

Personal life Lewis has been married three times. He and his current wife, Isabela Granic, have twin sons. Marc Lewis, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines his Former Life on Drugs (Doubleday Canada, 2011) Marc Lewis and Isabela Granic, Bedtiming: The Parent's Guide to Getting Your Child to Sleep at Just the Right Age (The Experiment, 2010) Marc Lewis and Isabela Granic (editors), Emotion, Development, and Self-Organization: Dynamic Systems Approaches to Emotional Development (Cambridge University Press, 2002)

Talks and lectures "Addiction and Trust", TEDx–Radboud University, 29 May 2013 "Technophilia", discussion with Martin Ford, Festival of Dangerous Ideas 2015, Sydney, Australia, 6 September 2015 "Why Addiction Is Not a Disease", The Middle Way podcast with Barry Daniel, 4 October 2015 "Reflections on the Science and Experience Addiction", Nobel Conference on Addiction, Gustavus Adolphus College, 7 October 2015 "London Thinks: Is Addiction a Disease?", interview/presentation at Conway Hall, London, 13 July 2016 "The Neuroscience of Addiction: Development, Not Disease", presentation at The Royal Institution of Great Britain, 14 July 2016 "Tricks of the Mind", Guardian Books podcast, 12 September 2016 "Drugs, Desire, and Disease: Neuroscience and Addiction", public debate, David Winston Turner Endowment Fund, Melbourne, Australia, 21 October 2016 "A Brain Disease…or What?", debate with Nora Volkow, Amsterdam Brain and Cognition, Amsterdam, 9 January 2018 "Is Addiction a Brain Disease? And Does It Matter?", P. Browning Hoffman Memorial Lecture in Law and Psychiatry, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA, 15 March 2018 "Addiction as Learning: Narrowing Brains in Narrowing Environments", University of Bergen, Sogndal, Norway, 4 September 2019

Articles for mainstream news and science press

Commentaries

Chapters in books