- Addiction has always been very, very difficult
to understand in terms of the sort of social
and psychological aspects.
I think increasingly we're understanding now
that addiction is a genuine medical condition
that has a neurological basis
that we're trying to understand.
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- No other country on earth has poker machines
in every corner, in bars, in clubs, in pubs.
You know, places where people go to congregate.
What we also see as a consequence of that is elevated rates
of all sorts of problems.
So that includes poverty of children, neglect of children.
Physical violence against intimate partners.
Lots of crime.
- A lot of Australian parents have well intended behaviours
which they don't realise are actually sending
the wrong message to their child.
Parents think that by providing their young person
at home with a sip of their wine at the dining table
that's a good way to introduce alcohol
and to teach them to drink responsibly.
- I think for some people food is an addiction.
Addiction centres in your brain sit very, very close
to your appetite centres and so there is a real cross over
between addiction and this disease state.
And if food is what it is that you turn to in that situation
if that's the way you're wired then it's very difficult
'cause you're surrounded by food everyday.
- I think there are probably many, many pathways
of why individuals come to addiction.
From a scientific perspective often a lot of those things
that we do in the environment that affect us, they tend
to change one of a few systems that we have
in terms of our psychology and our brain.
- I started drinking at 13 and I just fell
for it like a lemming off a cliff.
It was quite fetishistic really.
I remember going to my dad's drinks cabinet
and the sound that the bottles would make,
the heavy bottles as you scraped them off the shelf
and the smell of the wood and the varnish.
And it was very available to me because my dad's quite
a heavy drinker so I thought he's never gonna notice.
- If they only realised that their behaviours
are inadvertently reinforcing that alcohol use
is fine to their child.
So that's what I'm hoping that the response as a nation,
beyond changes in tax, changes in, you know, alcohol costs
and charges associated is actually
at the individual family level
equipping the community with the strategies and the tips
that are required to tackle this issue earlier on.
- There came a point where I realised
this just can't go on anymore.
And in the run up to that point, in the years running up to it
I would think to myself you really need
to stop drinking but it wasn't a serious thing
because I thought how can you?
How does anyone?
How do you shape your life without alcohol in it?
It just seemed ridiculous.
- I think it's very clear that research supports
the notion that these patients who have actually
been susceptible to a transition in their brain
that essentially goes from behaviour of choice
to habitual behaviour that they have much less control over.
A key part of some of the studies that we're doing here
in collaboration with the University of Melbourne
is to understand some of the neurological substrates
that happen as a person becomes addicted
to either alcohol or other drugs of abuse.
And see those transitions that happen in the brain
and find ways that we can intervene therapeutically
to prevent those from happening.
In our most recent research we have an animal model
of a rat which becomes addicted to alcohol over
a period of time and we can look at the potential testing
of various different drugs to see whether they
will reduce the essentially
the self administration of alcohol.
We feel that this research has the potential
to revolutionise the way that we treat alcohol
and other substance use disorders.
- If I could talk to my 13 year old self,
I would press upon her the fact that it's okay
to seek professional help.
I just can't emphasise that enough.
I didn't go and see a professional 'til I was 30.
And I was dealing with a lot on my own.
I suppose that women in particular tell ourselves
that our problems aren't important enough to seek help.
And that was certainly the case for me.
- Turning Point's a national addiction treatment, research,
and training centre.
Every year we have over 100,000 people call our help lines.
We have half a million people come
through our online services.
Around six or seven thousand people
actually seeking counselling online
with our counsellors 24/7.
And we have about five and a half thousand people
coming through our clinical services.
Treatment does work.
People have really good outcomes,
in fact better outcomes
than for other chronic health conditions such
as heart disease and asthma.
- BrainPark's gonna be, it's gonna drive your curiosity.
It's gonna be a little bit like a museum
that meets a science lab that meets a technology space
and a clinic all in the one place.
There's billions of dollars going into investment
in VR and we see that as a part of a future
of being able to do digital therapies.
We can't send someone into a casino geared up
with all these experimental equipment and measure everything
but virtual reality enables us to measure what's happening
in real time in the office but also in a safe way.
You actually get them
to do it and you measure their physiology, their psychology
their behaviour in real time.
- Our research is specifically interested
in two main areas let's say.
One is to try to understand what are the thinking
and brain drivers of addictive behaviour?
The link between addiction and obesity relates
to the fact that for some people with excess weight
and excessive eating characteristics some
of their eating behaviour is driven by strong cravings
for certain types of food.
By some problems to control the intake of that food.
- Once you've gained weight only about 3%
of people can lose a substantial amount
of weight and keep it off.
97% of people can lose weight on a diet
but 97% of people will put that weight back on
and that's because your weight is a very biological thing.
- By understanding that the preference for certain types
of food and the control of intake of those foods
is underpinned by mechanisms that are somehow similar
to the ones that underpin addictive behaviour, I think
it's a promising avenue for example to help people
in a better way to be able
to control their eating more efficiently.
- There's 28% of the population's obese.
I can't operate on all of them and nor can my colleagues.
We need a treatment that's effective
and can be delivered safely across
that large number of people.
- What we're looking at is whether
or not e-cigarettes help people to quit smoking.
There's been a lot of controversy around e-cigarettes
and I suppose in some ways we need more evidence about
whether or not e-cigarettes are an effective mean
to get people to quit smoking compared to our alternatives.
In this trial we're kind of exploring
the quitting aspect and we need
a lot more long term evidence to workout how harmful
are e-cigarettes themselves?
- The tobacco industry appeared
to be invincible 50 years ago.
Now it took a long time and a lot of work by a lot
of researchers in the public health sphere
but eventually we learnt the tricks of their trade.
We learned how they do what they do.
One of the key areas
in which the gambling industry influences policy
is by having a stranglehold on some gambling researchers.
So some of the worlds leading gambling researchers,
including a number of Australians, are very closely linked
to the gambling industry.
Now all of these tricks we know have been, you know,
undertaken in the past by the tobacco industry,
by the alcohol industry still.
And the gambling industry is continuing in that tradition.
We've been trying to unpack how the machines work.
How they do what they do, why they are so successful
at getting people addicted.
Of course the industry has not been very good
at sharing that sort of knowledge.
So I ended up being able to buy a machine
because a generous benefactor provided us with a donation.
We've now been able to produce a report
for the Australian Government's Gambling Research Centre
which outlines how machines work
and what we call the structural characteristics of them.
And if we know how they work we're
in good position where we can say well
this feature shouldn't occur because it unnecessarily adds
to the addictive potential of the machine.
- There's often almost a decade
or longer from when somebody starts developing problems
with alcohol and drugs or gambling before they seek help.
And that's an awful long time.
And the reason people aren't seeking help
is because first of all they don't believe
that it's a real issue.
So there's a big community concern around it not being real.
There is an opportunity here for us
to change community conversation
and to really think about how we can address this stigma
to ensure that people get help early by learning
from those other examples in medicines,
which is cancer and depression.