Amber Hollingsworth (speaker) summarizes the Rat Park experiments: rather than isolating rats in barren cages with drug access, the researcher created enriched social/environmental “Rat Park” housing and offered drug-laced versus plain water. Rats in the enriched environment largely avoided compulsive drug use, and even heroin-dependent rats often weaned themselves off after being placed into Rat Park. The speaker frames these findings as potentially important for understanding protective factors and strategies for addiction recovery, promising to discuss implications for people and families in a follow-up post.
Chapters
So I think most of us have heard about the studies where they put the rats in the boxes and there's a lever, and if the rat progresses the lever, then they all get a dose of cocaine. Most of us have heard about those studies and I don't think many of us were super shocked to find out that those rats pressed those levers until they basically overdosed. They would choose the cocaine over food or anything else. And some of those, those studies really are kind of the basis for a lot of our work and understanding about addiction and compulsivity. But I'm going to start our lesson by talking about some lesser known, a lesser known study called Rat Park. So here's. I'm going to tell you the story and I'm going to also provide you some links to look at some really cool YouTube videos that explain it with some animation in a pretty ne way. So let me give you the gist of it and the basis, and then I invite you to check those videos out and come back to Recovery Nerd to hear the rest of our story and how that may apply to you if you're an addict or an alcoholic, or may apply to you if you are a family member or loved one of an addict or an alcoholic. Okay, so Rat Park. So the guy, the guy from the studies from Rat park, he was looking at these other studies where you have the rats in the cages and the lever and the cocaine. And he starts thinking, well, you know what, you know, there's nothing else in those cages. It's kind of boring in there, kind of lonesome. I mean, there's pretty much nothing else in there except a lever that you can press and get some cocaine. So what else would you do? No, that never really occurred to me before. I guess that's why I'm not a scientist, because I would think that would be good scientific protocol, you know, controlling for outside variables. But this guy's smart enough to look at that and say, you know, that seems odd to me. I don't think the rat really has much choice. So he says, I wonder what would happen if we set the study up a little different. And that's why these studies are referred to as Rat park. Because what this guy does is he comes along and he actually devises this place for the rats that instead of being a barren, lonely, cold, lonely, isolated cage with nothing but one lever in it, he put all kind of fun, cool, what I call rat toys and fun rat stuff in there. In the other cages, there's no like rat wheel. There's no like cute rat girls. There's no other fun rat things to do. So this guy comes along and he does this rat park, which is basically like an amusement park. It's like the Disneyland for rats. And so he puts everything in those cages that a happy, healthy rat would want for happy, healthy life. So he puts all kind of cool stuff in there and then he runs an experiment. Now I'm thinking, if I'm remembering this correctly, I don't think he used cocaine. I think he used a heroin like substance or an opiate like substance and he put it in the water bottles for the rats. You know, you've probably had a hamster before or seen one at least. You know how they have those water bottles that hang on the side of the cage and the hamster mouse can kind of go up to the end of it and can get the little drops of water out. So he puts like two of these in the cages and one of them has this heroin like substance in it and the other one doesn't. And it's really pretty cool because what he noticed is that almost none of the rats really chose to use the water bottle that had the heroin like substance. None of them chose to use it compulsively. That was pretty cool. So they're being given this drug. I mean heroin, from what I'm told, it's a pretty good drug. And none of the rats seem to be getting really addicted to it. And that was some pretty interesting studies because that was really different than what we might would have expected. Now people came along and they looked at that and they thought, well, okay, whatever, but once an addict, always an addict. So I'm thinking if you already had like a heroin addicted rat, that it probably would choose the heroin water. Until the guy says, alright, let's just see about that. And so he takes these rats and he gets them good and heroin dependent. So he spends I think like six weeks or so and he gets them all dependent on this substance and then he puts them back in the rat part. And it's really surprising to me to see that even when he had them already dependent on the substance and he puts them back in the rat part, that they actually most of them weaned themselves off of the substance in the water bottles. Now some of them did have a little bit of withdrawal symptoms, but for the most part what you're going to see is that when the rats were being met otherwise, that they really start to wean themselves off of this dependency on the heroin or the addictive substance. Now this is really interesting. And for some people, it's really controversial because, and I say this to my clients all the time. We say once an addict, always an addict, which means once you have this problem, you have it. So I kind of explain to my clients, like, once you cross like a certain threshold into this problem, there really isn't much going back. And so this is super interesting because it really talks about something that we're not quite understanding as far as addiction and recovery. Looking at these rats actually getting themselves better. I mean, we didn't send them to a rat treatment center. We didn't give them a sponsor. We didn't electrically zap them with some sort of shock or something, something when they went to the heroin water. We just watched to see what would happen and what they did. And they actually weaned themselves off of that and then go on to live happy rat little lives. So I think, you know, why am I talking about this? It's super important when it comes to understanding what gets people better and what actually can be a protective mechanism against developing an addiction in the first place, and what can be a protective mechanism surrounded for keeping your recovery. So in the next post, we're going to talk about some of the implications of those studies and see how we can use that information to help us in our own personal recovery or in the recovery of our family. Look forward to seeing you then.
