“Imagine a world in which cocaine would never run out”: Interview with psychiatrist Anna Lembke

Anna Lembke is a psychiatrist and professor at Stanford University. Her book “Dopamine Nation” is an international bestseller that reaches far beyond the boundaries of science into our social lives. Lembke gets up extra early for the video call in order to have enough time for the conversation before her first patient in the morning. To start with, she tells us that she herself had a rather unusual addiction: she couldn’t get enough of cheesy vampire novels and even read them secretly in the toilet so that the rest of the family wouldn’t notice. “I knew it wasn’t particularly valuable from a literary point of view,” she says. “But I couldn’t help it, I had to keep reading.” Her new book will be published at the end of this year and will deal with one of the biggest problems of our time: the loneliness of young people.