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CASAC: Home

Introduction

CASAC stands for Credentialed Alcohol and Substance Abuse Counseling or Counselor. As a field of study, the CASAC certification draws from several different disciplines including neurobiology, psychology, sociology, and ethics. For more information on the program at MCNY, see the CASAC Purpose Handbook.

From Harvard Medical School special health reports (2019) in Credo database:

What Is Addiction?

People allude to addiction in everyday conversation, casually referring to themselves as “chocolate addicts” or “workaholics.” But addiction is not a term clinicians take lightly. The term is now listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), the reference book that physicians and psychotherapists use to categorize mental health problems.

The DSM-5 treats addiction as a diagnostic category including both substance use disorders and gambling disorder. At first, it might seem strange to put excessive gambling in the same category as drug or alcohol problems. But, as noted earlier, many addiction experts have moved away from the notion that there are multiple types of addiction, each tied to a specific substance or activity. Rather, addiction is a single problem with multiple expressions.
 

Related CASAC research guides

This guide contains material for the CASAC field as a whole and is a great place to begin research.  For more targeted research on common areas of study in CASAC, you should also use the following Research Guides:

CASAC

MCNY Catalog Search

General Information (Credo)

Credo Topic Pages brings together various resources available through some of the library's subscription databases. Designed by Credo Reference, topic pages provide excellent background material including definitions, encyclopedia entries, scholarly articles and relevant e-books.