Addiction Treatment

magazine

The next time you're on the freeway and see an otherwise well-put-together woman driving a bit erratically, it could very well be that you're witnessing a high-functioning alcoholic. Moms who get together for social activities may be secret imbibers – and you'd never know it to look at them. At home, alone or with family, wives and mothers may tip back way too many drinks and see nothing wrong at all with t ...

It's often said that addiction is a family disease, and it is, but it is one thing to hear that and another to actually comprehend what it means. Statistics and research studies can be starkly illuminating and profoundly disturbing at the same time. There's only one way to really know how addiction tears the guts out of a family – and that's to experience it. In The Lost Years, written by the mother-daughte ...

Of all the types of addiction, one of the most difficult to overcome may be addiction to opiates or painkillers. Opiates, in the form of OxyContin, Vicodin, Percocet, and Percodan, among others, are also America’s fastest growing addiction, according to experts. ...

Anyone who’s gone through treatment or got themselves clean by persistent attendance at 12-step fellowship groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Sexaholics Anonymous and others, knows that the going can be pretty rough at times. Fresh out of treatment, it’s both a blessing and a time fraught with temptations and challenges. Even if you don’t go through formal treatmen ...

Irreverent, impossibly funny, starkly revealing – these are perfect descriptors of the hard-to-put-down book by Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking. Yes, that Carrie Fisher, daughter of actress Debbie Reynolds and former crooner (and irrepressible womanizer, according to his daughter) Eddie Fisher. You might remember Carrie as Princess Leia from Star Wars, that little blockbuster film that also costarred Harris ...

When we think of hungry ghosts, it certainly conjures up an image of some pretty frightening specters. In the field of addiction treatment and recovery, such descriptors seem totally appropriate. Think of it. Hungry, as in devouring, destroying, seeking to annihilate. Ghosts, as in haunting spirits and thoughts never leaving our presence. Now, with the publication of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Enc ...

Meth is a tough subject to talk about. Many Americans don’t know very much about meth, much less anything accurate. Some people think meth was once a big problem but has since dissipated. Others only have a vague idea or gnawing worry that maybe meth isn’t gone from the landscape of America – it’s just gone into hiding. In Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, author Nick Reding shines a s ...

Twenty-five years after Melody Beattie wrote her groundbreaking book, Codependent No More, and following publication of three other books on codependence (Beyond Codependency, The Language of Letting Go, and The Codependents Guide to the Twelve Steps), the author is back again, this time with The New Codependency. This latest work sheds new light on how codependency has changed in the quarter century since ...

Walk a while in Mary Sojourner’s shoes (She Bets Her Life: A True Story of Gambling Addiction) and you’ll quickly realize what a slippery slope gambling addiction is – especially for women. Written from personal experience, the book is at all times brutally honest, and alternately funny, heartbreaking, warm and wise. The author takes readers through her first forays to the casinos, giving a first-hand accou ...

Science writer Dirk Hanson takes readers on a journey of understanding about addiction in The Chemical Carousel: What Science Tells Us About Beating Addiction. In a conversational tone, Hanson acts as teacher and storyteller as he sheds considerable light on the still-largely unknown field of addiction science. Some may wonder that there actually is such a field, but it is gaining traction every day, thanks ...