By BENEDICT CAREY
Dr. Griffith Edwards, a psychiatrist who helped establish addiction medicine as a science, formulating definitions of drug and alcohol dependence that are used worldwide to diagnose and treat substance abuse, died on Sept. 13 in a hospice near his home in Greenwich, England. He was 83.
He died after a stroke, his wife, Susan, said. The death had not been widely reported outside England.
Dr. Edwards reshaped thinking about heavy drinkers and their problems, about the psychology of drug use and its treatment, and about the policy implications for governments and health agencies seeking to reduce abuse.
He was among the first doctors to perform careful studies of skid row drinkers and of talk therapies for addictive drinking -- these at a time, in the 1960s, when habitual drunkenness was considered a moral failing and virtually the only treatment was to dry out.
In 1975, Dr. Edwards took what had been a respected but obscure medical journal, The British Journal of Addiction, and turned it into the field's flagship platform, publishing the top research findings from around the world.
In 1976, working with Dr. Milton M. Gross, another addiction researcher, he examined what was then loosely known as alcoholism. The two determined that a true drinking problem had several discrete, measurable components, like craving, heightened tolerance, loss of control and physical withdrawal symptoms. That description became the basis for the definition of drug or alcohol dependence in two of the world's most influential diagnostic manuals, from the American Psychiatric Association and the World Health Organization.
"He was one of the few true giants who moved the alcohol and drug field into mainstream medicine," said Dr. Marc A. Schuckit, a distinguished professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, "one of the first to begin asking questions in a systematic way about these problems" rather than merely describing them.
Continue Reading: nytimes.com
Dr. Griffith Edwards, a psychiatrist who helped establish addiction medicine as a science, formulating definitions of drug and alcohol dependence that are used worldwide to diagnose and treat substance abuse, died on Sept. 13 in a hospice near his home in Greenwich, England. He was 83.
He died after a stroke, his wife, Susan, said. The death had not been widely reported outside England.
Dr. Edwards reshaped thinking about heavy drinkers and their problems, about the psychology of drug use and its treatment, and about the policy implications for governments and health agencies seeking to reduce abuse.
He was among the first doctors to perform careful studies of skid row drinkers and of talk therapies for addictive drinking -- these at a time, in the 1960s, when habitual drunkenness was considered a moral failing and virtually the only treatment was to dry out.
In 1975, Dr. Edwards took what had been a respected but obscure medical journal, The British Journal of Addiction, and turned it into the field's flagship platform, publishing the top research findings from around the world.
In 1976, working with Dr. Milton M. Gross, another addiction researcher, he examined what was then loosely known as alcoholism. The two determined that a true drinking problem had several discrete, measurable components, like craving, heightened tolerance, loss of control and physical withdrawal symptoms. That description became the basis for the definition of drug or alcohol dependence in two of the world's most influential diagnostic manuals, from the American Psychiatric Association and the World Health Organization.
"He was one of the few true giants who moved the alcohol and drug field into mainstream medicine," said Dr. Marc A. Schuckit, a distinguished professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, "one of the first to begin asking questions in a systematic way about these problems" rather than merely describing them.
Continue Reading: nytimes.com
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