Israel looking to NHS's 'pioneering' treatment for behavioural addictions

Israeli Centre on Addiction wants to include support for addicts, inspired by the 'similarities between the NHS and the Israel public health system'

Israel is looking at the NHS’s “pioneering” work in starting to include “behavioural” addictions in its basic treatment of addicts — from gambling to obsessive screen time, or addiction to social media.

Professor Shauli Lev-Ran is co-founder of the four-year-old Israeli Centre on Addiction, (ICA) an umbrella research and training group which is holding its first fund-raising event in London on March 6.

He says that around 10 per cent of Israeli society — a figure roughly comparable to most developed countries —suffers from varied addiction problems, from alcohol or drug abuse to troubling sex abuse issues.

The ICA offers treatment and training — treatment to sufferers, and training to medical professionals in order to help them recognise addiction, and get patients the best and most appropriate aid.

During the pandemic, the ICA found “significant challenges for all of us, including home quarantine, reduced contact with close friends and family, job losses, financial anxiety, and a relentless stream of fear-inducing news. This combination of anxiety, on the one hand, and quarantine and boredom, on the other, can lead people with addiction issues to experience increased cravings and a return to addictive behaviour patterns.”

As a military society, there is an additional layer of stress for Israelis — PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. But Professor Lev-Ran says that “there were two major things in the 90s which probably contributed to increased national stress”. These were the absorption of more than a million immigrants (mainly from the Former Soviet Union), and the rise of terrorism and suicide bus bombings.

“Addiction is basically a pathological form of self-medication”, says the professor. “The higher the level of stress, the more we need some sort of self-medication”.

But, cheeringly, though one might expect this to mean that Israel would have a high level of addiction — it does not. The reason, says the professor, is that “we are quite a resilient society. Resilience is built on encountering hardships, but not succumbing to them”.

The ICA has an NHS representative on its international advisory board and Professor Lev-Ran says that Israel is keen to continue formal and informal links, “because there are similarities between the NHS and the Israel public health system. The NHS opened the first gambling addiction clinic as part of the public health sector, and is also providing treatment for internet gaming, screen addiction, social media… we are trying to learn from the NHS experience as to how to do it on a systemic level, and how to convey it to policy-makers and stakeholders”.