ADDICTED

Why can someone understand that a substance or behavior is causing serious harm—and still continue?

For families, friends, caregivers, and professionals, addiction can appear irrational, selfish, or impossible to reach. ADDICTED asks a more useful question: What is the substance or behavior doing for the person, and what must recovery provide in its place?

Drawing on history, neuroscience, clinical observation, public-health evidence, policy, mutual help, and the arts, registered nurse Niklas Selenius-Osterman explains addiction as both a medical condition and a human way of coping. The book shows how relief, reward, fear, trauma, isolation, physical dependence, and the need to escape can become entangled—and why knowledge, punishment, or simply removing the drug may not be enough.

Medication and harm reduction can keep people alive and reduce suffering. They cannot by themselves create housing, work, belonging, agency, community, or meaning. Lasting recovery requires attention to the function addiction served and to the life that must be built afterward.

Written for people trying to understand someone affected by addiction—as well as behavioral-health professionals, students, and people examining their own patterns—ADDICTED offers a humane but unsentimental framework for seeing the person behind the behavior.