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Scientists say the human brain is "hard-wired" in a way that makes belief in God help addicts to overcome their addictions.
Psychiatry Professor Doug Sellman and colleagues at Otago University's National Addiction Centre have joined theologian Lloyd Geering to argue that breaking an addiction requires a "higher power" than most addicts can summon by themselves.
They said yesterday that belief in an ideal imbued with spiritual meaning was "a universal human trait found in every human society throughout recorded time".
Dr Sellman said it was the same trait that allowed human beings, unlike other animals, to "imagine what is over the mountain".
"So we are hardwired to have big thoughts," he said.
"It's tapping into that, and helping people get a new vision of themselves as people, a new future for their lives, that is an important part of what is behind recovery."
In a paper in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Dr Sellman and his colleagues say that a defining feature of a drug addiction is that "behaviour appears to become increasingly driven by forces outside of the person's conscious control".
New brain research showed that addiction "hijacked" circuits between evolutionary old structures of the brain and the more recently evolved neocortex, which controls conscious actions.
"Breaking this compulsive behavioural pattern is one of the great challenges of recovery from drug addiction," the group writes.
"No wonder some believe that only a force as big as God is sufficient for recovery to occur."
They note that acceptance of God, or a Higher Power, has been a central element in recovery programmes such as Alcoholics Anonymous, and in kaupapa Maori addiction services.
However, they also note that some psychedelic drugs have helped people to reach deeper spiritual understanding in the past, and that medications such as naltrexone are increasingly being used to treat alcoholic and drug-addicted patients.
They have recommend that addiction counsellors should be careful not to dismiss their clients' beliefs in God.
This was even if they did not personally share those beliefs.
