Badges Earned: Thirteen

Course Description:

Addiction is one of the most ubiquitous forms of mental health disorders globally. In many countries, its burden on health care is so excessive as to constitute a medical and economic crisis. As a consequence of the magnitude of this disorder many scholars, institutions, and clinicians have desperately sought to understand and address this complex phenomenon. Although many theories of addiction exist, and our explanation of addiction has become more sophisticated, there are still serious shortcomings in our understanding. Furthermore, there is such a cornucopia of conflicting theories of addiction that for treatment providers, therapists, and policymakers it has become exceedingly difficult to integrate this vast field of knowledge into effective treatment. Within this course, we will look at methods meant to change this paradigm. We will provide researchers, academics, therapists and individuals who want to better understand these issues with a meta-conceptual architectonic of addiction and its treatment grounded in an integral approach.

Learning Outcomes:

By the end of this course students should be able to:

• demonstrate a basic understanding of the main categories of psychoactive substances and classification of substance use disorders;
• be familiar with the broad categories of eitological models of addiction;
• articulate what the current conceptual challenges are in addiction science and treatment design; and,
• understand the theoretical foundations of integral theory and address addiction from that conceptual perspective.

Faculty:

Guy du Plessis, BA, BA Honors, MA, PhD Candidate, holds a BA in Psychological Counselling (cum laude), BA Honors in Psychology (cum laude), and MA in Psychology (cum laude) degrees from the University of South Africa, and is PhD Candidate at Stellenbosch University. He is a registered psychological counselor with the HPCSA, and has worked in the addiction treatment milieu for over 15 years as an addictions counselor, head of treatment, program and clinical director, trainer, and researcher. He is the author of the book, “An Integral Guide to Recovery: Twelve Steps and Beyond” and has published numerous academic articles in the fields of addiction treatment and studies, theoretical psychology and philosophy. He is a Faculty Mentor in the School of Behavioral Sciences at California Southern University, Faculty member at the Wayne Institute for Advanced Psychotherapy at Bellarmine University, Researcher at Momentum Mental Healthcare SA, and Executive Director of the Mind-Body Bridging Institute.

Course Contact Information:

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