Health & Human Services, Enrichment, and Business and Management Enrichment Health and Human Services Business & Management

Addiction Biology: Like It, Want It, Need It

Addiction is a brain disease, and this workshop will explore the brain chemicals and brain areas affected by alcohol and other mind-altering drugs. Changes to brain chemistry, both short and long term, affect mood, cognition, and behavior. We will trace the process from voluntary to compulsive use, and from self-correcting and adaptive to autonomous rigid behaviors. We will cover the use of addiction medications as well as explore other implications for treatment. In this course, we will discuss:

  • how alcohol and other drugs affect and shape brain chemistry
  • interventions for pre-disposing factors
  • how the acquisition phase of the disorder relates to the compulsive phase
  • how a behavior becomes dissociated from its consequences
  • distinctions between abuse and addiction
  • medications used to treat addictive disorders
  • strategies for intervention and treatment

Nicolas Ruf, MA, LADC has been working in the field of substance abuse since 1974. He worked with the State's impaired driver countermeasures programs (DEEP) for over 20 years, and has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in substance related issues as well as presenting workshops to treatment providers, educational, medical, and civic groups from Maine to the Caribbean to Hawaii. He currently teaches at the New England Institute of Addiction Studies' Summer School and is an adjunct faculty member at UMO, Johnson State College, and University of Southern New Hampshire


Friday, November 30, 9 a.m.-4 p.m.

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$135 (6 contact hours/ 0.6 CEUs)
Abromson Center, 88 Bedford Street, USM Portland campus