Dr Philippe Batel - European ChemSex Forum 2016, London

1. THE ADDICTIVE BRAIN
HOW IT WORKS ?,
OR RATHER HOW IT MALFUNCTIONS?
Philippe Batel MD, PhD
Psychiatrist, neurobiologist & Addictologist
@ Cliniqiue des Addictions Paris

2. Goals - Summary
• Understanding how the brain is directly involved in the
process of addiction
• Identify brain structures relevant and their natural balance
• Overview of the disruptive systems to cause addiction
• Focus on the Chemsex issue
• Neurobiology of sexuality
• Cerebral Feature of effects of the Synthesis Drugs
• Try to understand why “love stories usually end badly”

3. Chems & Sex
From perfect matching to hell
• Let’s try to approach, on a neurophysiologic point of view to the
following questions :
• Why chems could pretend to help in sex, fantasy and cognitive
expectancies ?
• Why empathogenic effect of drugs used primarily in chemsex is a delusion
and a snare ?
• How is it that a magic couple initially evoking perfect matching will turn
after some fickle sensory ecstasies sessions into a hellish combination ?
• How this magical and perfectly collaborative fusion will mutate, from
ecstatic to less and less powerful and inconstant sessions in a conjugal
masquerade where each protagonist lets the other believe that it is still
essential to the happiness of the combination despite growing fiasco while
they clearly cannot pretend anymore that it does good to each other.

4. History of addiction models
1. Moral model
2. Pharmacological
model
3. Symptomatic model
4. Disease model
5. Learning model
6. Social model
7. Brain disease model
1976: Edwards & Gross
Biopsychosocial model
Alcohol dependence syndrome
4

5. Brain systems
a natural and physiological fragile balance

6. Strucures involved in Addiction

7. What it becomes dysfonctional ?

8. The nature of a illusion
The dopamine trap

9. Cognitive addiction process

10. That is « Chemical »
• Sexuality and Drugs (especially synthetic drugs) are
major vectors of pleasure and empathy
• Combination exacerbates all the brain structures involved
in the addiction process by creating a momentary illusion
of perfect matching
• The combination of these two addictions
• Enhaces dramaticaly the pleasure pardigm et their trap
• Galvanizes the delusional expectancies
• Develops cognitive distortions that promote behavior’s
perseverance