Gregoire Vitry

Christian Moretto, we are happy to welcome you to this first web conference dedicated to addiction. Can you tell us who you are and tell us about your background.

Christian Moretto

Thank you for welcoming me to talk about addiction and more particularly work addiction.

I have a somewhat atypical background since I have an engineering background and professional background.

I then turned to psychotherapy, in Italy, and am an associate researcher with Professor Nardone and one of his correspondents in New York.

I worked in a psychiatric hospital, then in a clinic on drug addiction and problems related to the use of narcotics where I applied the strategic model of Palo Alto.

Gregoire Vitry

Christian Moretto, we are happy to welcome you to this first web conference dedicated to addiction. Can you tell us who you are and tell us about your background.

Christian Moretto

Thank you for welcoming me to talk about addiction and more particularly work addiction.

I have a somewhat atypical background since I have an engineering background and professional background.

I then turned to psychotherapy, in Italy, and am an associate researcher with Professor Nardone and one of his correspondents in New York.

I worked in a psychiatric hospital, then in a clinic on drug addiction and problems related to the use of narcotics where I applied the strategic model of Palo Alto.

For 3 years, I have been back in the United States and have been employed at the Floating Hospital and I treat more particularly patients suffering from schizophrenia and panic attacks, while being a researcher.

Addiction has multiple sources

It may not be related to the taking of substances , for example work, sex, internet games, compulsive online shopping, the uninterrupted search for information because it is absolutely necessary to have the most up-to-date information possible. , running, lots of other things..... which can become addictions.

And it can on the contrary be linked to the taking of substances whose dangerousness must be assessed. In the rankings, alcohol takes first place; tobacco comes in 6th place, closely followed by marijuana.

There are several types of dependencies

They are more or less linked to the 4 great emotions which are:

• the fear,
• pleasure,
• pain,
• anger.

After the pleasure, comes the pain when one is deprived of the substance(s), because the well-known phenomenon of habituation is followed by an increased consumption of the same product or another product, to compensate for the loss of efficiency.

The functions of substances

• To tear oneself down, to pass into another world to be completely out of phase with reality
• Staying social and making sure to look like your peers: typical case of adolescents
• Control yourself or rather control your performance, your emotions if you can't do it naturally.

Taking substances = attempts at solutions

Taking substances is actually an attempt at a solution.

And when we take away from a patient his or her attempts at a solution, we leave him naked in the face of his problems. He therefore risks returning to the attempt at a solution which is his "drug", the substance or substances which he has chosen and which in fact constitute the problem.

We therapists therefore need to work on the whole context in which the patient's problem arose.