American · b. 1967
Anna Lembke runs the dual diagnosis clinic at Stanford, where patients arrive addicted to opioids, alcohol, cannabis, video games, pornography and their own phones. She read humanities at Yale, took her medical degree at Stanford in 1995, stayed on for her psychiatry residency, and has spent her career where psychiatry meets addiction medicine — treating patients, directing Stanford's addiction medicine fellowship, and testifying about how prescription drugs are sold. Drug Dealer, MD (2016) laid the opioid epidemic at the door of well-meaning physicians and the incentives that taught them to treat pain as a fifth vital sign. Her argument reached a wider audience when she appeared in the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. Dopamine Nation (2021), which casts pleasure and pain as opposite ends of one neurological seesaw, became a New York Times bestseller and pushed the phrase 'dopamine fast' into ordinary conversation. She writes about her own compulsions — romance novels read to the point of dysfunction — with the same clinical directness she turns on her patients.