Anna Lembke

Anna Lembke is a psychiatrist who specializes in addiction medicine. She studied humanities at Yale University, then earned her medical degree at Stanford University in 1995 and trained in psychiatry there. She stays at Stanford, where she is a professor, the medical director of addiction medicine and the chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic.

Her early work centers on the opioid epidemic. Drug Dealer, MD (2016) explains how doctors came to overprescribe opioids and why patients find them so hard to stop. She also gives expert testimony to legislators on prescription drug policy.

Dopamine Nation (2021) widens the lens from drugs to phones, food, shopping, gaming and pornography. Its core idea is that the brain balances pleasure and pain like a seesaw. Each hit of pleasure pulls the balance toward pain, and repeated hits leave a person in a constant deficit. Her answer is a period of abstinence to reset the balance, then self-binding rules and radical honesty. The book became a New York Times bestseller, and she appears in the 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. Some neuroscientists say her warnings about dopamine can discourage valid medication, such as treatment for ADHD.