Posts Tagged ‘Addiction’
Welcome to LifeRing
27 March 2013
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LifeRing Secular Recovery is an abstinence-based, worldwide network of people who are choosing to live in recovery from alcohol and other drugs. We encourage individuals to build their own personal recovery programs based on three principles: sobriety, secularity, and self-direction.
We believe our personal recoveries require communication and connection with others in addition to our individual practice of abstinence. In LifeRing, as we talk about recovery and share tools that have worked for us, we find our sober intellectual, analytical, and emotional selves engaged, nurtured, strengthened … and empowered.
Recovery requires hard work and perseverance. If you are self-directed and want to create a personal recovery program that is yours and yours alone, you owe it to yourself to check out LifeRing Secular Recovery.
Dealing with PTSD
26 February 2013
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Especially now that Lifering has gone public with its “dual diagnosis” email support list, this story from Scientific American is apropos to read. It’s primarily about PTSD in US military veterans, but due to PTSD occurrence being fairly high among alcoholics and addicts, it’s quite relevant to Lifering. It’s a good read for anybody who knows someone with PTSD, or someone suffering with its effects themselves.
It has a fair dose of “realism,” which I’ll note below the fold.
Lifering speaker on Democracy Now
25 December 2012
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Dr. Gabor Mate, who is the keynote speaker at Lifering’s 2013 annual convention or Congress, discusses stress and addiction issues on Democracy Now. It’s a full hour of compilation of three interviews from 2010.
Here is the link to the program should the video not load.
More on addiction is in the brain
29 October 2011
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The New York Times’ Nick Kristof has a good new column about the biochemical nature of addiction, based on its influence on dopamine and other brain chemicals. He’s writing about DavidLinden’s new book, “The Compass of Pleasure,” which I am now reading.
Kristof notes that things like altruism and acts of charity, not just chemical addictions or “process” compulsions/addictions, can light up the pleasure centers of our brain, as can things like exercise. (And yes, the research that Linden notes says that “processes,” i.e., gambling, overeating, and extreme sexual behavior, can become addictive in the same way as chemicals.
More on this below the fold:
Book review: An Anatomy of Addiction
05 September 2011
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Warning: For persons concerned about “triggers,” this book has some specific descriptions of drug use.
Two medical pioneers — including pioneers in the potential medical use of, and actual personal misuse of, cocaine. Howard Markel paints a cautionary tale of addiction that powerfully resonates a century and more later.
Many people know a bit about Sigmund Freud’s history with cocaine, despite later attempts to cover up just how much he used (or abused), how long he used it, and how much it affected his general work habits and his psychological theorizing.
Markel gets behind the story, not just with Freud, but a somewhat older near-contemporary, William Halsted. Halsted, less familiar to many, was essentially the father of modern American surgery, a pioneer in antiseptic and operating techniques in surgery, mainly from his perch of director of surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
When I was a kid, I read a mini-biography of Halsted in a compendium of lives of great doctors, so I had heard about his “sea cruise” attempt to overcome his cocaine addiction. But, the story closed with what Markel notes was long the “official line” about Halsted: that he had no major problems, or problems at all, after that.
How wrong I was, Markel shows.
I had no idea he was “committed” to Butler Hospital, a “sanitarium.” Nor that he was given morphine to “help” with cocaine withdrawal. Nor that he, as a result, apparently became a lifelong morphine addict. Nor that he apparently struggled to some degree with cocaine addiction for the rest of his life.
Markel, an M.D. and Ph.D. with addiction support help background, shows a clinician’s skill in diagnosing how addiction affected Halsted’s life, his work at Johns Hopkins, his relation to surgical interns and patients and more.