You do not need statistics to know that addiction is a ravaging worldwide health condition. But here are some disturbing ones anyway: The United Nations estimated that the global burden of disease due to drug use was 42 million years of “healthy” life lost. It has also been estimated that worldwide, about 100 million people suffer from alcohol addiction symptoms, and about 35 million suffer from drug addiction symptoms. This is harrowing.
Worse, the majority of people who experience addiction do not receive effective treatment based on scientific evidence due to lack of availability and accessibility—and the United Nations has rightly called upon national governments and the international community to step up interventions to address this gap.
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Worse still, this gap is often filled by non-evidence-based and pseudoscientific treatments.
As a clinical psychologist in Canada…
