Anna Lembke Audiobooks

Dopamine Nation: a Stanford addiction specialist on balance in an age of indulgence

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Who is Anna Lembke?

Anna Lembke, born in 1967, is an American psychiatrist working in addiction medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University. She is a specialist in the opioid epidemic in the United States, the crisis behind her book Drug Dealer, MD – an account of how doctors were duped, patients got hooked and why stopping proved so hard.

Her profile widened with an appearance in the 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma and, above all, with Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, published in 2021 and a New York Times bestseller. Her work is now a regular reference point in major outlets whenever addiction and compulsive behaviour make the news.

Anna Lembke in audiobooks

Dopamine Nation, her title in our catalogue, is that valuable thing: a book about compulsion written by someone who treats it for a living. Its subject – finding balance in an age of engineered indulgence – could hardly be better aimed at the way most of us live now, phone in hand.

There is a pleasing irony in the format, too: an audiobook about managing dopamine is a healthier hit than most of what competes for a spare half hour. UK listeners will find the clinical grounding reassuring rather than dry – this is expertise from the ward, not the lifestyle pages.