Addiction and Health Behavior

Addiction is a multifaceted health challenge with profound consequences for both individuals who experience addiction and society at large. This chapter explores addiction as a health behavior using an interdisciplinary lens, focusing on causes and consequences of addiction in domains of psychology, public health, public policy, sociology, and medicine. It emphasizes a biopsychosocial approach and synthesizes extant literature on the transdiagnostic factors underlying addiction to a variety of substances. It highlights the bidirectional relationship between addiction and other health behaviors, and it emphasizes that addressing common vulnerabilities and patterns among diverse negative health behaviors can enhance their treatment. It provides illustrative examples of how nicotine, alcohol, cannabis, and opioid use can predict non-substance-related health behaviors, how non-substance-related health behaviors can predict the use of these substances, and the co-occurrence of addictions and other health behaviors. This chapter discusses how addiction treatment must be comprehensive and integrative to address the broad spectrum of health behaviors associated with it, and, finally, this chapter makes recommendations for future addiction research that further integrates psychology, public health, public policy, sociology, and medicine.