Introduction

Addiction Professional, July, 2004 by Lewis P. Lipsitt

Why are we talking about behavioral misadventures? Today more young persons to the age of 35 die of behavioral misadventures than of all diseases combined. This simple statement is supported over and over again by epidemiological data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Accidents, suicides, homicide, smoking, dangerous drug use, excessive drinking and bullying are responsible for more deaths and debilities among young people than the aggregate of all diseases in our society today.

Modern medicine and public health advances, such as sanitation control and mass immunization, can take a lot of credit for this. Having gotten the infectious diseases under control, we now face the natural next step in public health advances--the problem of death and debility from psychological causes as the basis of much human misery.

Early indications are that the application of the behavioral and human developmental sciences has been successful in reducing smoking, controlling alcohol consumption and drug use in vulnerable individuals and helping young persons growing up under adverse conditions to turn their lives around and avoid what seemed like inevitable, negative outcomes. People behave on occasions in ways that we don't expect, but behavior is a natural phenomenon. Killing other people is no more a random act than selecting a spouse, majoring in journalism or writing a will.

That we are so limited in our knowledge at this stage in human history about the origins and nature of human behavior is unacceptable. We must fire up the engines that will create a science of human behavior, including behavioral misadventures, as powerful as physics and chemistry and biology combined. The cause is urgent.

RELATED ARTICLE: Partial List of Conference Participants

(in alphabetical order)

David Abrams, Ph.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and Director of the Centers for Behavioral and Preventive Medicine, Brown University/Brown Medical School

Ronald Dahl, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

David B. Goldston, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Medical Psychology, Duke Child and Family Study Center, Duke University School of Medicine

David C. Lewis, M.D., Professor of Medicine and Community Health and Founding Director of the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies, Brown University

Susan P. Limber, Ph.D., Associate Director, Institute on Family and Neighborhood Life, Clemson University

Lewis P. Lipsitt, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Medical Science and Human Development; Former Director, Child Study Center, Brown University/Brown Medical School

Raymond P. Lorion, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology in Education, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania Sponsored by the Lipsitt-Duchin Annual Lecture Program, Brown Medical School, the Brown University Lectureships Committee, the Wayland Collegium, the Charles O. Cooke, M.D., Distinguished Visiting Lectureship, and Manisses Communications Group, Inc. The Lipsitt-Duchin Annual Lecture Program at Brown University is endowed by the Edna Duchin Lipsitt and Lewis P. Lipsitt family.

Report written by Linda Watts Jackim

The models used within this report are for illustrative purposes only, and in no way represent or endorse KidsPeace.

Lewis P. Lipsitt, Ph.D.