Who's Addicted to Addiction? Sally Satel on the Social Media Trials & America's Therapeutic Culture
About this episode
Sally Satel discusses the complexities of social media addiction and its implications in the legal system.
“You can do as many brain scans as you want, but you’ll never be able to distinguish an impulse that wasn’t resisted from one that’s irresistible.” — Sally Satel on why social media addiction can’t be proven in court When Meta and YouTube lost the so-called landmark social media addiction trial back in March, there was jubilation inside and outside the courtroom. Finally, Big Tech seemed a bit less big. Justice, it seemed, had finally been done. Or maybe not. (Full disclosure: my wife is head of litigation at Google, so I might be a bit biased). But today’s guest, the psychiatrist Sally Satel , doesn’t have a dog (or husband) in the fight, and she’s a skeptic of the trial’s outcome. A senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the medical director of a Washington methadone clinic, Satel argues that the concept of addiction — her clinical specialty — was distorted in the trial to serve a $1.4 trillion litigation pipeline. The plaintiffs’ theory reifies addiction as behavior beyond control. If that were true, Satel argues, none of her patients would ever get better. Satel comes at this as a doctor rather than a moralist. Clinically, she acknowledges, social media…
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