Do you suspect there might be a better way of describing and understanding addiction? Do you feel your practice might work better if you had a more persuasive interpretation of the phenomenon you work with every day?

How do you like your theory of addiction - what mix of the medical, sociological, neurochemical, psychological, psychiatric, philosophical, political and spiritual do you want it to contain? 

What part do you think families, relationships and love play in the genesis of the phenomenon and in its treatment?

Unhooked Thinking is precisely that: unhooked, uncertain, discursive, open, free to go wherever it needs to go, having let go of the insecurities that prop up the more doctrinal approaches to addiction.

Unhooked Thinking has no doctrine except to say that to be unhooked from addiction it helps to be unhooked in your thinking. 

One of the many charms of Unhooked Thinking is that we make it up as we go along – like life. We offer no prescriptions.  And there seems to be an appetite for this approach.

A list of the subjects Unhooked Thinkers are interested in would be endless, but here’s a few: addiction as expression of family dysfunction, the relationship between prohibition and addiction, the stories or myths that keep addiction afloat, the connection between addiction and the self, treatment as life-training, the idea that love is the absence of addiction, and much, much more.

None of these subjects has any kind of “answer”, definitive or not, but they are all the source of a lot of unhooked discussion.

Bolstered by the wide range of positive feedback we’ve had from Unhooked Thinking 2006 (see for yourself at the website to: www.unhookedthinking.com), we, the management group, are now planning Unhooked Thinking 2007, which will happen from May 9th to 11th next year in the Guildhall in central Bath, a venue with much better acoustics and breakout facilities than the Assembly Rooms where we held this year’s event.

The theme of the conference will be: “Love and Baggage – the part love, families and relationships play in addiction and its treatment”.

And we’re inviting your participation.

As the theme implies, not only will the conference be for drugs and law enforcement workers, doctors, service users and academics, but for that largely forgotten group, the families of users. We believe that such apparently very different groups can and want to talk to each other.

If you have any ideas for a solo or group presentation or a seminar or other breakout session, please let us know. We particularly want to encourage women and ethnic minorities to participate.

In the first instance email a short (50 words or less) synopsis of your idea to william@unhookedthinking.com. Thank you.

Unhooked Thinking, May 9th to 11th 2007 in the Guildhall in central Bath [England]
http://www.unhookedthinking.com

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William Pryor is Director of Unhooked Thinking, and author of the book Survival of the Coolest: A Darwin's Death Defying Journey into the Interior of Addiction