The Lizard Brain: How I Came To Learn that Addiction is a Disease How I learned that addiction is a disease Malina Saval, provided by FacebookTwitterEmail In a bright, white auditorium on the rolling campus of a rehab center on the East Coast, I learned that addiction is a disease. The giant room was filled with addicts and alcoholics, including my then-husband, who’d checked in for a monthlong stay to get sober after decades of drinking and drugging. It was family week, and I’d flown in from Los Angeles, where we lived. We had a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old at the time, both of whom were born amid the chaos of a family pummeled hard by a disease in which piles of weed and whiskey highballs were as commonplace as diapers and baby food. There was no singular moment when everything imploded, but a series of events that chipped away at our collective sanity, from raging arguments in Chinese restaurants to quieter episodes wherein my husband would sit on the sofa, stoned, watching tennis for days on end. We both went mad over time. It happened, as Hemingway wrote in “The Sun Also Rises,” gradually and then suddenly.