Stanton Peele


Stanton Peele is a psychologist, attorney, psychotherapist and the author of books and articles on the subject of alcoholism, addiction and addiction treatment.

Career

Raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Peele received his B.A. in political science cum laude on municipal and state scholarships from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967. Supported by a number of fellowships, he went on to earn a Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Michigan in 1975. From 1976 to 2012, he maintained a private practice and consultancy while based in Morristown, New Jersey.
After earning his J.D. from the Rutgers School of Law – Newark in 1997, Peele was admitted to the New York and New Jersey bars. He maintained a concurrent law practice until 2012. As a psychologist and addiction specialist, he has held visiting and adjunct academic positions at New York University, Bournemouth University and The New School. He currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Peele inaugurated the Life Process Program as a residential treatment program in Iowa from 2008 to 2011.
Peele is the author of fourteen books, including Love and Addiction, The Meaning of Addiction, Diseasing of America, The Truth about Addiction and Recovery, Resisting 12-Step Coercion, 7 Tools to Beat Addiction, Addiction-Proof Your Child, Recover! Stop Thinking Like an Addict, Outgrowing Addiction: With Common Sense Instead of "Disease" Therapy, and his memoir, A Scientific Life on the Edge: My Lonely Quest to Change How We See Addiction, as well as 250 other professional publications.

Addiction

Peele began his critique of standard notions of addiction when he published Love and Addiction. According to his experiential/environmental approach, addictions are negative patterns of behavior that result from an over-attachment people form to experiences generated from a range of involvements. He contends that most people experience addiction to some degree at least for periods of time during their lives. He does not view addictions as medical problems but as "problems of life" that most people overcome. The failure to do so is the exception rather than the rule, he argues. This view opposes the brain disease model of addiction. Peele has used the term life-process model of addiction to describe this model, as originated and advocated by in his 1991 book The Truth About Addiction and Recovery written with Archie Brodsky and Mary Arnold.
In his books on non-addictive child rearing, Addiction-Proof Your Child and Outgrowing Addiction, Peele argues that the best antidote for addiction is raising independent children who are competent and who have pro-social, health-oriented values. These same profiles, along with socially privileged backgrounds, account for which young people are able to overcome whatever addictive episodes they have.
In a number of papers, as well as his 1989 book, Diseasing of America: Addiction Treatment Out of Control, Peele has argued that treatment, including as ideally administered in Project MATCH, is an inadequate, even iatrogenic, cultural response to addiction. This is particularly true, he finds, for disease treatments, since they diminish people's sense of themselves and their ability to change.
When it was published in 1975, Love and Addiction pre-dated by almost a decade the notion of sex addiction and codependency popularized by authors such as Patrick Carnes, whose Out of the Shadows, one of the earliest popular books to describe sex addiction, came out in 1983, and Melody Beattie, whose Codependent No More was published in 1986. Love and Addiction pre-dated the current popular use of the terms "sex addiction" and "codependency" to describe disorders of love attachment, as these terms were not part of Peele and Brodsky's nomenclature. However, because Love and Addiction was concerned with observing the same condition of addictive human attachments, it has been argued that this is the first book to be written on the subject of codependent relationships.
In reviewing the legacy of Love and Addiction, psychologist Dr. Alex Kwee wrote:
"That experiences can be addictive was a prescient notion in 1975 as psychology now embraces the concept of the process addictions such as pathological gambling, compulsive eating, and sex addiction. But it must surely be to Peele's dismay that instead of rethinking substance addiction as a medical illness, psychology has gone and classified the behaviors as addictions in the same medical sense and yielded the solution into the hands of the 12-Steps."

Views on alcoholism

Peele maintains that, depending on the person, abstinence or moderation are valid approaches to treat excessive drinking. In a Psychology Today article which compared the Life Process Program with the disease model, he also argues against the theory proposed decades ago by modern physicians, mental health professionals, research scientists, etc. that addiction is a disease. In Diseasing of America, Peele contested Dr George Vaillant's pro-disease treatise The Natural History of Alcoholism.
Peele has been concerned with identifying cultural factors in support of positive alcohol experiences, as well as medical and psychological benefits due to positive drinking practices. Primarily, he has found, such drinking occurs where alcohol use is socialized in young people in family and community settings. He has also sought to generalize this paradigm to drug use.

Views on 12 step/disease treatment

In a co-authored book, Resisting 12 Step Coercion, Peele outlined his case against court mandated attendance of twelve-step drug and alcohol treatment programs. He argued that these treatment programs are useless and sometimes harmful, he presented research on alternative treatment options, and accused some addiction providers of routine violation of standard medical ethics, an accusation that is likewise often leveled at Peele by disease proponents.
In The Truth About Addiction and Recovery and 7 Tools to Beat Addiction, Peele laid out what he believes to be the elements of alternative treatment. He developed these ideas as the Life Process Program, which was the basis for a non-12 Step residential treatment program and is now offered as an online treatment resource by Dr. Peele and colleagues.
Peele attributes the intensifying drug crisis in the US to the continuing acceptance and spread of the disease model of addiction in both its 12-step and brain disease forms since, he feels, the disease model undercuts the sense of self-efficacy that characterizes positive, controlled substance use.

Criticism

In a review of The Meaning of Addiction, addiction researcher Dr. Griffith Edwards stated the following about Peele's work:

Recognition

Nick Heather, PhD and Emeritus Professor of Alcohol & Other Drug Studies at Northumbria University, and co-editor of the book Evaluating the Brain Disease Model of Addiction commented:1989: Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies Mark Keller Award for Alcohol Studies for his article "The limitations of control-of-supply models for explaining and preventing alcoholism and drug addiction," JSA, 48:61-77, 1987.

Funding

Lindesmith Center : grant to write an adolescent drug guide.
The Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, and the Wine Institute provided unrestricted grants for research used in the journal article ''Exploring Psychological Benefits Associated with Moderate Alcohol Use: A Necessary Corrective to Assessments of Drinking Outcomes?''