Dr. Carl Fisher, MD

Assistant Professor and author of The Urge

Columbia University

Carl Erik Fisher is an addiction physician, bioethicist, and person in recovery. He is an expert in addiction and recovery who has sought to make sense of topics like self-control, suffering, and behavioral change across an unexpected variety of topics and fields: not just science and medicine, but also history, spirituality, philosophy, politics, arts and literature, and more. Through deep investigations of these surprising perspectives, Carl seeks out the ideas and practices that help all people flourish in their lives.

Dr. Fisher is the author of the nonfiction book The Urge: Our History of Addiction, published by Penguin Press in January 2022: a history of addiction, from ancient India and Greece to the present day, interwoven with his own experiences as an addiction psychiatrist at Columbia and as someone in recovery himself. It was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker.  He is an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University where he studies the role of neuroscience and psychiatry in society. He is a fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, and he is in the national leadership of the American Psychiatric Association as a member of its Council on Psychiatry and Law. He also maintains a private psychiatry practice focused on addiction, with a special focus on complementary and integrative practices like the evolving science of mindfulness and meditation. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Scientific American MIND, and elsewhere. He also is the host of the Flourishing After Addiction podcast, a deep-dive interview series exploring addiction and recovery. He lives between Brooklyn, New York, and Lisbon, Portugal, with his partner and son.

Carl is represented exclusively by the BrightSight Group