Expert profile
Dr James Garbutt
Academic psychiatrist and alcohol researcher. Spent around 45 years at UNC Chapel Hill as a professor of psychiatry and a research scientist at the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies, with roughly two decades focused on developing medications for alcohol use disorders.
Alcohol use disorder pharmacotherapy • the neurobiology of alcohol dependence • naltrexone response and its moderators • clinical trial methodology
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About the expert
Focus: Explains that alcohol has an acute anti-stress effect while simultaneously activating the brain s stress systems, so that stress reactivity rises the following day and, over months or years, a person can end up drinking to quiet the systems the drinking activated. Declines to give figures he does not have.
James Garbutt is an academic psychiatrist who spent around 45 years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as a professor of psychiatry and a research scientist at the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies. His work has centred on the biology of alcohol use disorders and, for the last two decades of his career, on medications to treat them — he was principal investigator on the JAMA trial of long-acting injectable naltrexone, one of the pivotal studies in alcohol pharmacotherapy. He is the only independent voice on this episode: the host and the other two guests all work for the health system that runs the challenge being discussed.