Rob Calder talks to Professor John Marsden about cocaine cravings from the recent paper: Acute impact of self‐guided mental imagery on craving in cocaine use disorder: a mixed‐methods analysis of a randomized controlled trial. Professor Marsden discusses the lack of pharmacological treatments for cocaine, and about his recent study using mental imagery to address cocaine cravings. He talks about the benefits of positive imagery compared with negative imagery. He then discusses how useful mixed-methods research can be and the importance of writing up data from unfinished trials.
“A particular participant … had an image of his son or daughter having an ice cream and wearing a particular outfit. And he bought that to mind randomly and said it was astonishing. He said ‘you really got under my skin with this procedure. I felt a real gnawing desire. I had images of cocaine in my mind, I could smell it, I could taste it, I certainly wanted it. And when I bought the image to mind’ – the protocol was to ask people to really think about it for a minute or so and experience all the different qualities – he said ‘it swept the craving experience away’.”
The original article can be found here: Lowry, N., Marsden, J., Clydesdale, B., Eastwood, B., Havelka, E.M. and Goetz, C. Acute impact of self‐guided mental imagery on craving in cocaine use disorder: a mixed‐methods analysis of a randomized controlled trial. Addiction 2021; doi:10.1111/add.15405
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