Self-administered aversion therapy?

[Daniel E.]

Aversion therapy is mostly relegated to history. An exception, however, is Antabuse for alcoholism, which is helpful for some people in the short-term:

http://www.bettyfordcenter.org/news/askdrwest/sdarticle.php?id=62

 

[ephemeral1]

Well, maybe not. I entered this forum excited about the prospect of studying aversive conditioning and almost every single one of your responses has been an aversive conditional stimulus.

 

[Daniel E.]

You can always call, e-mail, or visit your professor during office hours. Depending on your timeline, you can also wait until Dr. Baxter's return.

To see some of the old studies on aversive therapy for substance abuse and even for obesity, you can search pubmed.com. Many of the articles listed in pubmed are available at health science university libraries.

You can also search Amazon.com and find references using the "search inside this book" feature that is available for many of the books at Amazon.

To give you an idea of how painfully outdated aversion therapy is, the only book I can see on Amazon that is just about aversion therapy is:

The punishment cure: How aversion therapy is being used to eliminate smoking, drinking, obesity, homosexuality ... and practically anything else (1975)

(Decades ago, the American Psychological Association made the mistake of continuing to allow homosexuality to be considered a mental illness and condoned the use of aversion therapy for homosexuality.)

You can also search Google Scholar:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=aversive+therapy&hl=en&lr=

and/or use the article databases at your college library. Most college librarians are very helpful if you need any help finding references.

I would note, however, that a paper arguing for a certain treatment of a psychological problem doesn't look very convincing if most of the refernces are from the 1970s and 1980s.