Well, hello everyone. I couldn't be more honored and humbled by getting the Founders Award from the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry. It really is something that speaks to me and makes me so grateful for being part of this community of addiction psychiatrists, something that I have been treasuring for at least 20-25 years now. So, thank you very much. I'm really, really, really honored about it. The topic I would like to explore today is the technological addictions and the next frontier of addiction psychiatry. Before doing that, I would like to honor my mentors who have contributed so much to both my career and my development, my personal and professional development. So, I'm going to start with the first group, my mentors back at Columbia, where I did my residency in psychiatry. And I put some names down here, and I really have wonderful stories for each one of them, but I'm not going to do that. It's going to take way too long, except I'm going to say something about the late Herb Klieber, who was one of my mentors at Columbia. And he said to me at some point, say, you know, our job here is matchmaking. That's what we're here to do. We need to match what people are good at with what people will be doing in their careers. And that really stuck to me. And I think it's guided me throughout the different positions I've had all the way up to today. And in my everyday administrative and faculty work at Rutgers, that's what I try to do, try to see what our residents and fellows and medical students are most good at, and try to match that with perhaps some ideas about where to go. I remember Herb saying that, well, if somebody's interested in research, I can do that. If somebody's interested in media, I have friends in the media world, and I can make these kind of connections. If somebody's interested in making money, I will help them with that too. And so that really has stuck with me. And there's a fine detail there in that, at least the way I remember it, is not what people are are passionate about. It's more like what people are good at that matters the most. Anyway, ideas that are very, very close, they're related to each other. All these people that you have in front of me have played quite a role in my development. And of course, after Columbia, I went to NYU for my fellowship in addiction psychiatry under the leadership of Dr. Gallanter. And here's another set of absolutely wonderful addiction psychiatrists who shaped me and helped me through some really tough times at Bellevue Hospital and at NYU. It weren't really that tough times. I'm not saying the truth here. There were absolutely wonderful times. I spent four years at NYU and it was really a blast. So yeah, that's much more truthful. Then there were several other mentors that I've had from different walks of life. Certainly Dr. Rick Rosenthal gave me the first job at the Addiction Institute of New York. And Laura Roberts, I mean, Richard Francis, so many people who have really helped me all along. Then I want to end this chapter here with my family, which in a way they mentored me, but much more, hopefully, they love me more than mentoring me. And I put them, all the other lists are in alphabetical order. This is in the order I got to meet these people. First, my mom, my dad, my wonderful brother, George, and of course, my husband, Lucas Hassel. Several of you know him. He comes to our meetings and he has developed quite a few friendships through our AAAP work. Okay. Let's just look at the technological addictions now. The way that I would like to do that is to go through, first of all, some general remarks about the lay of the land, where technological addictions fit into our understanding of addiction. Then move on to the two technological addictions that have perhaps the most data, the most evidence behind them, internet gaming and cyber sex. Then, of course, move on to assessment, diagnosis, and treatment. The good news there is that you are incredibly familiar with most of these ideas. The bad news is that we don't have that much to offer that would be quite specific for the technological addictions. But still, just as any of you are also placing the technological addictions in that context could be helpful. Then we'll conclude. At the very end, I also would like to mention my colleagues and from the different areas of scholarship that have developed over the past few years, but we'll do that at the very end. All right. The lay of the land. Technological addictions belong in the behavioral addictions, in the non-substance use disorders, and the core, the essential element of all behavioral addictions is a failure to resist an impulse drive or temptation to perform an act that is detrimental to either the person herself or himself or the people around them. You can just hear the echo of the DSM here, that for something to be a disorder, it has to create havoc either in the person herself or himself or the people around them. So essentially, we all agree that the hallmark of the behavioral addictions is this failure to resist a dysfunctional act, repetitively performing a dysfunctional act. Okay, wonderful. But there are two rather distinct paths to arrive at that dysfunctional act, a path of impulsivity and a path of compulsivity. Let's just stay there for a minute. What is a purely impulsive act? Purely impulsive act, I'm happy-go-lucky, nothing good, nothing bad is happening in my life. I go through and I see something that attracts my attention, I go in, I grab it, I make it mine, and then I emerge on the other side cool as a cucumber. A purely impulsive act. And then, on the other end of the impulsivity-compulsivity spectrum, we have a purely compulsive act, which has a different profile. I think about the dysfunctional act, I start ruminating about it, I start obsessing about it, I get more and more anxious, the anxiety escalates, I'm so conflicted, I try not to do the act, anxiety escalates, escalates, escalates, it reaches a point where I cannot resist anymore, I perform the dysfunctional act, all the anxiety completely resolves, and then it starts building up again. A purely compulsive act. And then you can think about the behavioral addictions as falling somewhere in between those two bookends. Even better is to think that each individual behavioral addiction, gambling, sex, internet, whatever it is, sometimes has more of an impulsivity flavor to it, and sometimes it has more of a compulsivity flavor to it, recognizing that most times, most of our patients will fall somewhere in between these two extremes. What am I saying here? Take gambling, for example. There are some gamblers who keep on playing the slot machines, and they have a much more compulsive feel to their disorders, where there are, of course, other gamblers who are much more impulsive in the way that they bet, the way that they intersect with the gambling world. All right, here are the behavioral addictions. A little arbitrary as to which exactly made the cut to come into our behavioral addictions book that I published some years ago, but here you have it. Gambling, sex, technology, food, shopping, tanning, exercise, work, and love. Now, I'm sure you know gambling disorder was made officially part of the Substance Use and Addictive Disorders chapter of the DSM-5. Unfortunately, sex did not make it into the DSM-5. There's a lot of controversy and a lot of arguments and a lot of angst around hypersexuality disorder and sexual addiction and all kinds of things, and eventually it did not make it into the DSM-5. Hopefully, it will be into the DSM-6, but it does have a lot of research behind it. And the technology, which is the one that we're going to be talking, spending most of our time today. Here are the technological addictions. We took that part from the behavioral addictions and expanded it to the technological addictions. Once again, Dr. Sherer and myself decided on those seven technological addictions somewhat arbitrarily, but there's some evidence, there's some research that goes behind each one of those. Internet gaming and cyber sex are the ones that I'm going to be exploring in some detail, but I'm going to spend one slide each in each one of the other five technological addictions as part of the lay of the land. Internet gambling. This is data from 2020. Now it's 2021, and the data you have in front of you is grossly outdated. It's such a moving target. Different states have different regulations, different laws. They just address internet gambling in different ways. Just one thing that I find particularly sinister in a way is sports betting. Even the name betting, it's not, you know, it's a little kinder, gentler than gambling. I'm not a gambler. I just bet. I just do sports betting. Of course, there's no difference between the two. You can lose tons of money and get completely addicted to sports betting as well. Infobesity has two different facets. First, it's internet surfing. These rabbit holes of when you start researching something on the internet, and before you know it, one thing leads to another, and you start looking at cute cats and dogs and people falling into swimming pools and whatever have you, and five or six hours have passed, and you've done nothing, and you have learned nothing, and you have accomplished nothing. Internet surfing. Information overload is a little different in that you do get good information, this is valid stuff, but it's so much. You get so much information that eventually you get paralyzed and you cannot make a decision. Both of them, facets of infobesity. And of course, social media. I love the subtitle of our social media chapter in our technological addictions book, The Self Versus The Selfie. From a psychodynamic perspective, it really brings us face to face with how much worth are we? How much of our self-worth is dependent on other people liking us and clicking like, like, like, and what happens if they don't like? And you have somebody who has liked pretty much all your wonderful entries in social media and all of a sudden decides not to like what you're putting up. How much can you read into this? And of course, the fear of missing out. The world-renowned FOMO, where all your friends vacation at the most exotic places and have the most fabulous lives. And there you are looking at all those pictures and all these entries and go like, what happened to my life? It's just like so much less wonderful and less expansive and rich than all my friends. Obviously, there's an incredible level of selection bias in these entries. And, you know, that goes without saying, but it also gets undetected quite often. All right. Texting and email. Wow. I put up a slide from 2020 when I talked about internet gambling before. Now, I really, really overdid it. I put up a slide from 2019. Now, these are grossly outdated statistics. Why? Because the technological culture just evolves and progresses at an incredible speed. For example, emailing versus texting. I use a lot of email and I feel like I'm a boom of yesterday years. Everybody's texting these days and there's a whole culture in texting that is a little different than the culture of emailing. And before you know it, you can be quite addicted to either modality or both. And finally, online auctions and shopping. Now, this is particularly problematic among older adults who have shown increased rates of getting addicted to eBaying or online auctions, shopping, and also perhaps more prone to scams. There's a difference between technology natives and technology immigrants. I am a technology immigrant. When I grew up, there was not really that much technology. It was TV and the like, but not this highly interactive world that we now live in. But my 11-year-old niece, my brother's daughter, is just totally comfortable and confident with it. So she is a native. She's a technology native. Makes a big difference. All right. In terms of online auctions and shopping, when you get the email about the prince from overseas who left $30 million in a London bank, waiting for you to make a withdrawal, it may have a little more of an opportunity to convince somebody who is a technology immigrant rather than somebody who's a technology native. All right, so let's talk about internet gaming. And I'm gonna start our talk about internet gaming with a picture of my colleague and a great friend that James Shatter. Several of you know James, he's the guy on the left and he would be the first one to admit, not to admit, to actually be delighted about internet gaming. He's a big gamer and says that he has given him careers, friends and popularity. So I couldn't agree more. The majority of people who engage in internet gaming as well as any of the other technological addictions will have no problem with it. But a small number of people will develop what looks very much like an addiction. So lots of positive things about internet gaming, including careers, friends and popularity. This picture is from back in 2019 when there were physical conferences and PAX East and West and all that. One day, I hope our meeting is gonna be back to in-person and we'll get to see each other up close and personal. All right, some statistics here. Boys play more than girls. What I like the most about the statistics is the last check mark at the bottom. When parents, when we ask the question, do parents limit kids' screen time? Do parents limit kids' screen time? Look at that. 94% of parents say yes, while 72% of youth say no. You know, the truth must be somewhere in between. Or my hunch is that the youth probably know what they're talking about better than the parents. Those with no rules play twice as much. So that's something else to kind of file somewhere. The other recommendation for families is that no matter what rules you put together about people using cell phones or tablets or any other kind of technological engagement is to have consistent rules for everyone in the family. For example, if you decide that we'll have no cell phones at the dinner table, you cannot expect the kids not to bring their cell phones, but the parents to just be there texting and responding to cell phones. So, you know, whatever rule you put together, whether it is time limits or space or activity, it has to apply to everyone in the family. All right, some positive things that have been shown to be associated with the internet gaming. Sharpened eye-hand coordination, multitasking. I'm not sure how good it is, but you become better at multitasking if it's associated with playing a lot of video games. Vision, visual attention, visual tracking. And perhaps the most interesting to me at least is mental rotation. Now, all of us have this ability, some of us better than others, to look at an object and based on incomplete data, on incomplete visual contact with that particular object, we fill in the gaps and we rotate it in our heads and we can see the other side or we can guess what the other side may be. And we can rotate these objects in our head. And of course, if you play a lot of games, a lot of video games, you may become much better at this mental rotation. Now, some people have hypothesized that if you become good at mentally rotating objects, you may also become good at seeing social issues from different points of view and become more tolerant perhaps to different viewpoints in society. I don't know, it seems to me that this is a little bit of a leap there and I would probably stick with the objects, the physical objects that we can rotate in our heads. All right, some negatives that have been associated with internet gaming, grades go lower, exercise suffers, sleep, not hanging out with physical friends, although hanging out with friends through texting and through the different social media is probably sharpened for people who also play a lot of video games. And for us psychiatrists of particular importance, feeling lonely associated with video games. In terms of violence, do violent video games induce, precipitate, cause, whatever you want to call it, actual physical violence? And the answer to that is no. As a matter of fact, there's a new study that came out of the Department of Economics maybe four or five days ago that says that if anything, people who spend inordinate amounts of time playing video games may have a lower rates of physical violence against other people. One of the way they explain it, and makes sense to me too, is that in order to play video games, you usually stay at home. And when you stay at home in front of a monitor, your chances of physical violence to other human beings, statistically speaking, is lower. It's like too much time spent with a video game itself indoors. So you don't get a chance to actually be violent against other people. All right, here is the goal of a lot of video games. A lot of you may remember that tobacco companies back in the 20th century would hire chemists and put them together with the explicit mandate, with the explicit task to find the best possible combination of chemicals that would maximize the addictiveness of cigarettes. And of course, that's part of what they got in trouble with the tobacco lawsuits. Something similar is happening with companies that develop video games. They have psychology labs, they hire psychologists whose explicit task and mandate is to figure out the optimal combination of challenge and skill to keep the player going with the particular internet game. It's often called the flow state, the zone of flow. And if you look at this diagram, if the challenge is much higher than your skill, then you just get anxious and you just quit playing. If the challenge is much lower than your skill, then you get bored and you stop playing again. And again, you stop playing. And there is this sweet spot for lack of better words in between that is the target of people who design and develop video games, the zone of flow. And that's where they get people. And that's where people have a significantly increased chance of getting addicted. All right, some new concepts that are not that new, I mean, they have been around for a year or more now. Microtransactions, loot boxes. Candy Crush Saga is notorious for microtransactions that started with 199. It gets you a little advantage in the game and it gives you a little bit of a hammer here perhaps or a bomb there or whatever it is. And A, just these microtransactions themselves can multiply it by millions of people can make you millions of dollars, but also the escalate in their prices. And then you can, there are such things as like a hundred dollar package deal that gets you lots of goodies. And you open these loot boxes and you have been more kind of goodies in there. All these ruses to get you into the flow zone. And then of course, a few words about COVID-19. To me, it's hilarious that the WHO, the World Health Organization in May of 2019 in a very public way, in a campaign style way, they unveiled that gaming disorder is an official medical disorder, part of the ICD and people should take it seriously and take its place in the medical pantheon. Then a year later in May, 2020, the very same organization launches a campaign called Play Apart Together, encouraging people as much as possible to play video games in the spirit of social distancing so that the people stay indoors and don't go out and they reduce the chance of transmitting COVID-19. They both make sense to me, but you have to look at the irony of their same organization launching those two campaigns only a year apart. And there are other things that have been associated with COVID-19. I don't know how many of you may have come across Animal Crossing. It's a particular kind of game where there are no winners, there are no losers. Everything is sweet, everything is nice. There are these animals in the farm. There's a clock inside the game. So the animals go to bed when you go to bed and the animals wake up when you wake up and everything is just so wonderful. There are no conflicts. There's no toxicity. It's just, everything is lovely. And a lot of people have said that given the increased anxiety and stress that we all experience with COVID-19, getting to this utopian world of Animal Crossing is exactly what the doctor ordered. I like the saying that it's a vacation that never has to end. So a different kind of game than auto theft and all the other things that may be far more conflictual than Animal Crossing. Animal Crossing. All right, moving on to cyber sex. All right, cyber sex is an umbrella term that encompasses many different aspects in an online pornography, online dating, sex chats, sex webcams, and teledildonics. We've had teledildonics for quite some time now, but COVID-19 really saw an explosion of teledildonics. The etymology of the word says it all. You can imagine that you get this console and you can manipulate sexual objects in far, far away places across different countries, different continents. And so you can have a sexual partner and enjoy sexual activity with her or him through teledildonics by manipulating these sexual objects on the other side of the globe. Let's look at internet porn. Quite a few problematic things about internet porn. One of it has to do with the fact that people limit themselves in sexual partners because of online porn, meaning that everybody is just so amazing on these images that you will never find somebody in real life who can measure up to the images that you see on the screen. But the second aspect, the second problematic area of internet, of online porn, is probably even more catastrophic in my mind. And that is your self-esteem. You compare yourself to these porn stars on the screen and you feel inadequate. You feel that you cannot really perform as a sexual being the same level as the things that you see in front of you. So online porn runs the serious danger of limiting the sexual life of a human being. And of course, when it crosses to the level of being a frank addiction, then it can devastate a person's life. We did a wonderful program last year at Triple AP when we showed Don Juan and discussed online porn, Don Juan. All right, internet porn based on the Triple A model of accessibility, affordability, and anonymity. Very self-explanatory, online porn, highly accessible, very affordable, most of it is free, and not 100%, but to a very large extent, anonymous. These days we can never be guaranteed anonymity for pretty much anything, but within reason, it is quite anonymous. All right, let's move on to online dating. Now, this is a picture that I took in New York City. This is the MTA bus in Manhattan. And on the side of the bus, there's an advertisement for a soft drink that says your taste buds will always swipe right. Your taste buds will also swipe right, a direct reference to online dating. When you swipe right, when you like somebody, you swipe left when you don't like someone. I'm showing this picture to point out that there's nothing extraordinary, there's nothing outre, there's nothing extreme about online dating. It's really how a lot, a lot of people date in 2021. All right, the increasing popularity of online dating a lot of people, probably including myself, think of it in terms of accessibility, that sex both virtual and real is only a click or a swipe away. So there's just so much of it available out there. There are no that many obstacles. So, you know, there you have it. And that's how they became so popular. Steve Lee proposed the opposite theory, said, no, no, no, no, not so fast. The popularity of online dating relies on the unavailability of actual encounters. He says that if you decide to date on apps and sites, then your life is really a life of constant rejection. You reject people and you get rejected all the time. And then only infrequently and somewhat unpredictably in a classic variable, intermittent reinforcement way, you may have a true encounter, which as you very well know, is the recipe for perpetuating behavior. I don't know how much I agree with Steve about this, but it was a very interesting way of thinking about it. All right, here are the statistics for dating sites and apps in 2020. About 30% of US adults date on sites and apps. As you could predict, younger people have higher rates of online and app dating. If you go down the list here to straight versus gay, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, 50% of us date on sites and apps, while about 28% of straight. Bottom line, it's very, very much part of the fabric of life in the third decade of the new millennium. Here's Grindr, probably the grandparent of online dating apps. You must know about Grindr, I'm sure by now, but for the few of you who may not know, is a GPS-based app. So you are on your Grindr on your cell phone and you can see that somebody else, maybe, I don't know, like a few feet away is also on Grindr and you can see their picture and you can exchange photos. It's all for gay men and take it from there. It's an extremely successful app and it has given rise to all kinds of other apps now that there are more specialized, SCRAF, again, previously self-explanatory, people with facial hair who like other people with facial hair or body hair. So you can become very, very specific about the dating app that you are gonna pursue. One of my favorite ones is Tinder, which of course is a very, very popular straight app, but is now becoming more and more popular among gays who may be interested more in a combination of romantic and sexual relationships, not necessarily just hookups, but some of these other apps are based on. Okay, now the next couple of sections are gonna go fast. Why? Because this is a sophisticated audience here and you know about assessment and diagnosis of substance use disorders and really would rely very, very heavily in answering the question, how do I know my patient is addicted to technology? We just go down the list, essentially, of the substance use disorders, the assessments for the substance use disorders. Quite a few diagnostic criteria sets have been proposed, some of them with a little bit of data behind it, but pretty much all of them run along the four major buckets, the four major clusters of symptoms that we think about when we think about addiction. First of all, the physiological aspect of addiction, tolerance and withdrawal, we do see that with technological addictions as well. The more somebody uses, the less the effect or they need to play more, they need to engage more in the particular technology in order to have the same level of satisfaction. Withdrawal syndrome from technology is one of these non-specific syndromes with irritability and dysphoria and malaise, insomnia, anxiety, and of course tantrums in children. So this is classic physiological aspects of addiction, tolerance and withdrawal, and we do see it in the technological addictions as well. Second cluster of symptoms, the internal worries, the preoccupation about the particular technology, and that has to be above and beyond what would be expected for the person's profession or age or social circle, meaning that a lot of us, hopefully not as psychiatrists so much, but a lot of people, their job mandates them to be in front of a monitor pretty much for the entire workday. With telepsychiatry, some of us also spend a lot of time in front of a monitor, but if when that gets much, much more than what is expected for somebody's profession, age, social, micro-environment, then that is quite problematic. Inability to cut down despite desire and efforts, and of course attempts to relieve negative moods. This is the self-medication part of addiction. This is where people feel dysphoric or bored or anxious, and they go to Candy Crush Saga or wherever it is to find some relief. Third cluster of symptoms, the external consequences. This is when you lose your job because of your technological addiction, or your relationships go down the drain, you give up your hobbies. And one that is somewhat new to this cluster of external consequences is deceiving loved ones. Now, one could very, very, very reasonably argue that we've known about deception of loved ones from the beginning of time when it comes to alcohol use disorder and a bunch of other substance use disorders, but it really was the live bet test of gambling disorder. The two question screening instrument for gambling disorder. For gambling disorder, live bet. Have you bet more than you intended and have you lied to people important to you about your gambling? And that's tradition about lying to people important to you. And the language there is significant because you may lie in your everyday life about all kinds of things, but if you end up lying to everyone, including the people who are very, very close to you, then that is quite a red flag. And finally, my favorite one, my favorite symptom of addiction, what I consider to be the most phenomenologically, the most characteristic of the addictive process, continued use despite knowledge of adverse consequences. I know it's bad for me, but I cannot help it. I cannot really do otherwise. So that's what it is. That's how we assess and diagnose the technological addictions, borrowing very heavily from the substance use disorders. And then treatments. All right, what do we have to offer in terms of treatments? What can my patient do about it? Counseling. Some of you very quickly recognized this is the brief intervention of the NIAAA, part of SBIRT, of Screening Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment. And the core elements of three major elements of brief intervention, which we do use in technological addictions as well, is the following. You reflect back to the patient the results of your evaluation. What I see here is that you've lost three jobs over the past five years. I see that the wife took the kids and left you, whatever it is. Next step, you educate the patient about addiction in general and how her or his involvement with technology may very well be part of an addictive syndrome. And then you advise. You advise for next steps. Where do we go from here? You refer, of course, if necessary, and you follow up things that we do rather routinely. Okay. Back to here. For this group here, we don't refer. We are the end of the line. We are the addiction psychiatrists. So if I show this slide to another group of internists, they say, okay, if it gets over your head, send them to me. For us, this is it. We are the addiction psychiatrists, the end of the line. All right, in terms of psychosocial interventions, you guessed it, CBT, once again, connecting thoughts, behaviors, and feelings, analyzing automatic thoughts, behaviors, and feelings, giving people alternatives to a dysfunctional preoccupation that they have with technology, very, very similar to what we've been doing with addiction since the beginning of time. Motivational interviewing, also a very powerful technique. Motivational interviewing, people would, Carla Marienfeld and Bashar al-Nawaz would be just like so upset that I said motivational interviewing technique. Motivational interviewing does not have techniques. It has approaches. So they would chastise me for that, and for very good reason. All right, a motivational interviewing approach would be quite helpful, especially for people who are in the earlier stages of change. If somebody is in the pre-contemplation or contemplation stage of change, some motivational interviewing approaches could be quite helpful. In terms of medications, no FDA-approved medications directly addressing the technological addictions. Some evidence about mirtazapine here and there, and I don't want to confuse you, we really do not have anything concrete to offer at this point. However, given that quite a lot, perhaps the majority of patients who suffer from a technological addiction will also have one or more other psychiatric disorders, including substance use disorders, we aggressively address co-occurring psychiatric disorders. And as you very well know, we have quite a few robust pharmacological treatments for the treatment, quite a few robust pharmacological treatments for depression, anxiety, opioid use disorder, tobacco use disorder, all kinds of other psychiatric disorders. This being said, going all the way back to the beginning of this talk, when we discussed the impulsivity-compulsivity spectrum of illness, there may be some, not exactly evidence, but there may be some rationale to use opioid antagonists, naltrexone, of course, being the most commonly used one, if you conceptualize your patient as being primarily on the impulsive end of the impulsivity-compulsivity spectrum of illness. The other hand, if you conceptualize your patient of being more towards the compulsive end of the impulsivity-compulsivity spectrum of illness, then you may very well want to think about antidepressants, SSRIs, of course, bonafide treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder. So a highly obsessive mind may very well benefit from a treatment with an SSRI. All right, and with that, we reached the conclusion part of this talk. Four points that I would like to make. Here are the technological addictions, the way we understand them in 2021. Internet gaming, cyber sex, internet gambling, infobesity, social media, texting and emailing, and online auctions and shopping. In terms of the phenomenology of technological addictions, the hallmark of addiction, continued use, despite knowledge of adverse consequences is applicable to this set of conditions as well. For psychosocial intervention, counseling, quality behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing, the core treatments of addiction also very helpful in technological addictions. I shouldn't say very helpful, quite likely helpful in technological addictions. And finally, no medications approved for any of the technological addictions, but aggressive treatment of co-occurring psychiatric disorders is absolutely a must. All right, and with that, I would like to thank you very much. I also would like to thank so many people who have been part of my professional trajectory in addiction psychiatry. First of all, my patients, but also my friends, my colleagues, faculty, staff here at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, as well as the Addiction Institute of New York, NYU, Columbia, the places that I have gone through in my work as an addiction psychiatrist. And of course, my students, my residents, my fellows that have taught me so much. Literally, I do believe I've learned so much more than perhaps I've taught them in addiction psychiatry. Here are the teams that we have worked. I organized these colleagues of mine according to the five most recent books were published. This is the group that worked on the addiction assessment and treatment. I mentioned that Bashar and Carla, my wonderful friends, we worked on the motivational interviewing group, motivational interviewing book for AAPI. And then the group on mindfulness headed by Dr. Zerbo, who's here with us on faculty at Rutgers. Of course, the buprenorphine book headed by John Renner, a wonderful mentor of mine for so much in addiction psychiatry. A lot of it specific to AAAP and a lot of it just outside of AAAP as well. And the APA, we've done a lot of work through the APA as well. We've taught over a hundred official buprenorphine courses. The LGBTQ mental health group, my work with Dr. Yarbrough, who is here in New York City. And finally, the technological addictions book just came out earlier this year with Dr. Scherer and a group of very young psychiatrists, a lot of them residents and fellows of our addiction medicine program right here at Rutgers. And with that, I want to once again say how much appreciative and honored I am for having received this award from the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry. And I hope to see you again soon, hopefully in person. All right, bye-bye now.

Founders Award

American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry

addiction psychiatry

technological addictions

assessment

diagnosis

treatment

flow state

online dating