New research reveals that the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms, in combination with talk therapy, could be a promising treatment for people with alcohol addiction. In a study published Wednesday in JAMA Psychiatry, scientists found that patients taking this drug, called psilocybin, had an 83 percent decline in heavy drinking, while those who took a placebo experienced a 51 percent decline.

The addictive-like use of social networking sites like Facebook might be a risk factor for impaired sexual function, according to new research published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine. The study provides evidence that frequent and compulsive use of social media is linked to a number of sexual problems among both women and men.

The mystery of addiction — what it is, what causes it and how to end it — threads through most of our lives. Experts estimate that one in 10 Americans is dependent on alcohol and other drugs, and if we concede that behaviors like gambling, overeating and playing video games can be addictive in similar ways, it’s likely that everyone has a relative or friend who’s hooked on some form of fun to a destructive degree. But what exactly is wrong with them?

When I was in tenth grade in Tampa, Florida, I was, like millions of other high school students, assigned to read The Catcher in the Rye for English class. Like millions of other high school students, I was extremely fragile. I was holding on by a thread. I was 15 and spent much of my time at school, on the days I would go, doing OxyContin, Xanax, cocaine and speed in the bathroom.

New York City became the first city in the country to allow supervised drug use sites where people can use illegal drugs without threat of arrest, under the watch of trained staff, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday.

Using e-cigarettes and other tobacco products to keep from relapsing to cigarettes doesn't appear to be effective, according to a new longitudinal study of nearly 13,000 smokers in the United States.

Frustrated by out-of-control increases in drug overdose deaths, California's leaders are trying something radical: They want the state to be the first to pay people to stay sober. The federal government has been doing it for years with military veterans and research shows it is one of the most effective ways to get people to stop using drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine, stimulants for which there are no pharmaceutical treatments available.

Social media is a civilization-level problem

A leading US scientist, Prof Kent Berridge, has transformed our understanding of human desire.

New research published in Frontiers in Psychology suggests that being absorbed by your smartphone might bear some resemblance to a hypnotic trance. A hypnosis experiment found that students with heightened smartphone addiction scores followed more hypnotic suggestions than their counterparts.

Long-term BYU study looks at the effect of video game play and the trajectories of addiction

The Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson has been described as “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world.” He is an exponent of the Jungian concept of the hero’s journey, in which an ordinary person heeds a call to adventure and goes out into the world to struggle and suffer, only to return with heightened self-knowledge.

When the woman walked into the Natick Police Department, she brought two things with her: baked goods and a letter. Both were to say thank you to the first responders who saved her life. “I overdosed for the last time in August,” she wrote in the letter. “It was a major wake up call. I went to detox the next day and haven’t used since. Due to you guys saving my live through CPR and Narcan I got my life back!”

A story about the connection between one patient and her doctor—and how more hospital emergency rooms are becoming entryways to drug treatment.

New research in pigs examines how sugar intake affects the brain's reward circuits and finds that changes are noticeable after just 12 days.

What drives a person to smoke cigarettes—and keeps one out of six U.S. adults addicted to tobacco use, at a cost of 480,000 premature deaths each year despite decades of anti-smoking campaigns? What role do emotions play in this addictive behavior? Why do some smokers puff more often and more deeply or even relapse many years after they've quit? If policymakers had those answers, how could they strengthen the fight against the global smoking epidemic?

As the country struggles with a terrible opioid crisis, we remember a similar epidemic that raged through the U.S. in the 1800s.

Depression is a very complex disorder and we simply have no good evidence that antidepressants help sufferers to improve

A Philadelphia jury ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay $8 billion in damages to a man who said his use of J&J’s antipsychotic Risperdal caused enlarged breasts.

An Oklahoma judge has found Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiaries helped fuel the state's opioid drug crisis and ordered the consumer products giant to pay $572 million US to help address the problem.