Lee Hogarth
Experimental health psychologist
Biography
Lee Hogarth is an experimental health psychologist with a core focus on risk factors and treatment mechanisms in addiction. His work encompasses epidemiology combined with experimental manipulation of risk factors to test causal effects, small scale randomised controlled trials evaluating therapeutic ingredients, secondary data analysis, and critical evaluation of animal to human translational pipelines and grand theoretical models of addiction. He is a critic of the brain disease model and related automaticity and compulsion theories of addiction, arguing that attributing addiction to individuals’ personal flaws further marginalises already disadvantaged groups and is a form of victim blaming veiled in scientific language. Instead, he argues that addiction arises from economic/environmental deprivation motivating abnormal intentional drug choice. He advocates structural/political reform promoting access to healthy, rewarding, and exciting alternatives.