Download or read book The Biology of Desire written by Marc Lewis and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the vivid, true stories of five people who journeyed into and out of addiction, a renowned neuroscientist explains why the "disease model" of addiction is wrong and illuminates the path to recovery. The psychiatric establishment and rehab industry in the Western world have branded addiction a brain disease. But in The Biology of Desire, cognitive neuroscientist and former addict Marc Lewis makes a convincing case that addiction is not a disease, and shows why the disease model has become an obstacle to healing. Lewis reveals addiction as an unintended consequence of the brain doing what it's supposed to do-seek pleasure and relief-in a world that's not cooperating. As a result, most treatment based on the disease model fails. Lewis shows how treatment can be retooled to achieve lasting recovery. This is enlightening and optimistic reading for anyone who has wrestled with addiction either personally or professionally.

Download or read book Loving Someone in Recovery written by Beverly Berg and published by New Harbinger Publications. This book was released on 2014-02-02 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recovering addicts are faced with many challenges, and these challenges can often extend to their romantic partners. During the recovery period, couples often struggle with overcoming feelings of betrayal and frustration, and may have a hard time rebuilding trust and closeness. While there are many resources available to recovering addicts, there are limited resources for the people who love them. In Loving Someone in Recovery, therapist Beverly Berg offers powerful tools for the partners of recovering addicts. Based in mindfulness, attachment theory, and neurobiology, this book will help readers sustain emotional stability in their relationships, increase effective communication, establish boundaries, and take real steps toward reigniting intimacy. The material in this book is drawn from the author’s successful Conscious Couples Recovery Workshop. With more than 25 years in the field, she has developed a unique set of exercises that address the issues faced by couples in recovery. This book addresses the roles that both partners play in recovery, and aims to help readers develop a new appreciation for one another and improve self-confidence and acceptance. The road to recovery is never an easy one, but by building a strong support system, the chances of success are exponentially greater. For more information on Berg’s work, visit consciouscouplesrecovery.com

Download or read book Memoirs of an Addicted Brain written by Marc Lewis and published by Doubleday Canada. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping, ultimately triumphant memoir that's also the most comprehensive and comprehensible study of the neuroscience of addiction written for the general public. FROM THE INTRODUCTION: "We are prone to a cycle of craving what we don't have, finding it, using it up or losing it, and then craving it all the more. This cycle is at the root of all addictions, addictions to drugs, sex, love, cigarettes, soap operas, wealth, and wisdom itself. But why should this be so? Why are we desperate for what we don't have, or can't have, often at great cost to what we do have, thereby risking our peace and contentment, our safety, and even our lives?" The answer, says Dr. Marc Lewis, lies in the structure and function of the human brain. Marc Lewis is a distinguished neuroscientist. And, for many years, he was a drug addict himself, dependent on a series of dangerous substances, from LSD to heroin. His narrative moves back and forth between the often dark, compellingly recounted story of his relationship with drugs and a revelatory analysis of what was going on in his brain. He shows how drugs speak to the brain - which is designed to seek rewards and soothe pain - in its own language. He shows in detail the neural mechanics of a variety of powerful drugs and of the onset of addiction, itself a distortion of normal perception. Dr. Lewis freed himself from addiction and ended up studying it. At the age of 30 he traded in his pharmaceutical supplies for the life of a graduate student, eventually becoming a professor of developmental psychology, and then of neuroscience - his field for the last 12 years. This is the story of his journey, seen from the inside out.

Download or read book Facing Addiction in America written by Office of the Surgeon General and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All across the United States, individuals, families, communities, and health care systems are struggling to cope with substance use, misuse, and substance use disorders. Substance misuse and substance use disorders have devastating effects, disrupt the future plans of too many young people, and all too often, end lives prematurely and tragically. Substance misuse is a major public health challenge and a priority for our nation to address. The effects of substance use are cumulative and costly for our society, placing burdens on workplaces, the health care system, families, states, and communities. The Report discusses opportunities to bring substance use disorder treatment and mainstream health care systems into alignment so that they can address a person's overall health, rather than a substance misuse or a physical health condition alone or in isolation. It also provides suggestions and recommendations for action that everyone-individuals, families, community leaders, law enforcement, health care professionals, policymakers, and researchers-can take to prevent substance misuse and reduce its consequences.

Download or read book Beating the Dragon written by James McIntosh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suitable for 2nd and 3rd year students taking courses on drug/misuse prinicpally in departments such as Sociology, Law, Nursing and Social Work. The use of illegal drugs is widespread in many societies. In much of the media coverage an impression is often conveyed that the use of illegal drugs other than cannabis is a one way street leading inevitably to addiction, destitution, family breakdown and death. The perception of addiction as a fixed end point characterised by personal and social dissolution fails to recognise that many dependent drug users, even after a period of prolonged dependent drug use, nevertheless still manage to overcome their dependence upon illegal drugs. This process of recovery, either with or without the assistance of helping agencies, has been variously descibed by researchers, drug counsellors, clinicians and others. We still lack much of an understanding of the process recovery as seen from the addict's own viewpoint. Beating the Dragon describes in detail the road from addiction as experienced by 70 ex-addicts. All the people interviewed had been using major illegal drugs for many years and yet managed to overcome their addiction through a variety of means. By looking in detail at the experiences of this group of recovering addicts the authors aim to produce a ground breaking ethnography of the recovery process.

Download or read book Great Leaders Live Like Drug Addicts written by Michael Brody-Waite and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if you learned that to lead well, you’d need to live like a drug addict? During treatment for drug addiction, Michael Brody-Waite learned three principles that became the difference between life and death: Practice rigorous authenticity Surrender the outcome Do uncomfortable work Leaving rehab, Michael entered the workplace where he was shocked to see most business leaders doing what he had been taught would kill him. He began to see striking similarities between drug addiction and what he calls “mask addiction.” Leaders everywhere were hiding their authentic selves in order to get what they wanted. They were doing things like: Saying yes when they could say no Hiding their weaknesses Avoiding difficult conversations Holding back their unique perspectives Instead of chasing drugs, leaders were chasing professional, financial, and social success from behind a mask—to the detriment of themselves and the people around them. Thanks to his recovery, Michael’s three principles gave him an unlikely competitive advantage throughout his career, resulting in a level of success unexpected for a “drug addict.” In Great Leaders Live Like Drug Addicts, Michael explains what drug addicts do to recover and provides a step-by-step program you can use to break free from your mask addiction to thrive in both work and life. He equips you with the tools you need to live and lead mask-free—tools to enable you to stop following others, lead yourself, and become one of the dynamic, growing, authentic leaders this world desperately needs.

Download or read book The Urge written by Carl Erik Fisher and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-01-25 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and The Boston Globe An authoritative, illuminating, and deeply humane history of addiction—a phenomenon that remains baffling and deeply misunderstood despite having touched countless lives—by an addiction psychiatrist striving to understand his own family and himself “Carl Erik Fisher’s The Urge is the best-written and most incisive book I’ve read on the history of addiction. In the midst of an overdose crisis that grows worse by the hour and has vexed America for centuries, Fisher has given us the best prescription of all: understanding. He seamlessly blends a gripping historical narrative with memoir that doesn’t self-aggrandize; the result is a full-throated argument against blaming people with substance use disorder. The Urge is a propulsive tour de force that is as healing as it is enjoyable to read.” —Beth Macy, author of Dopesick Even after a decades-long opioid overdose crisis, intense controversy still rages over the fundamental nature of addiction and the best way to treat it. With uncommon empathy and erudition, Carl Erik Fisher draws on his own experience as a clinician, researcher, and alcoholic in recovery as he traces the history of a phenomenon that, centuries on, we hardly appear closer to understanding—let alone addressing effectively. As a psychiatrist-in-training fresh from medical school, Fisher was soon face-to-face with his own addiction crisis, one that nearly cost him everything. Desperate to make sense of the condition that had plagued his family for generations, he turned to the history of addiction, learning that the current quagmire is only the latest iteration of a centuries-old story: humans have struggled to define, treat, and control addictive behavior for most of recorded history, including well before the advent of modern science and medicine. A rich, sweeping account that probes not only medicine and science but also literature, religion, philosophy, and public policy, The Urge illuminates the extent to which the story of addiction has persistently reflected broader questions of what it means to be human and care for one another. Fisher introduces us to the people who have endeavored to address this complex condition through the ages: physicians and politicians, activists and artists, researchers and writers, and of course the legions of people who have struggled with their own addictions. He also examines the treatments and strategies that have produced hope and relief for many people with addiction, himself included. Only by reckoning with our history of addiction, he argues—our successes and our failures—can we light the way forward for those whose lives remain threatened by its hold. The Urge is at once an eye-opening history of ideas, a riveting personal story of addiction and recovery, and a clinician’s urgent call for a more expansive, nuanced, and compassionate view of one of society’s most intractable challenges.

Download or read book Alive Again written by Howard C. Samuels and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2013-03-27 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful book on addiction recovery by a doctor who overcame addiction himself, the renowned founder and president of The Hills Treatment Center in Los Angeles Howard Samuels is one of the world's leading drug and alcohol addiction experts who runs the prestigious The Hills Treatment Center in Los Angeles. Decades ago, from the age of sixteen until he was thirty-two, Dr. Samuels had his own intense struggle with addiction to cocaine and heroin. Using his own compelling story as inspiration as well as case studies of his patients from all walks of life, Dr. Samuels shows how readers can recover from alcoholism and drug addiction by following this 12-step program to happiness and fulfillment in sobriety. This self-help book provides hope, inspiration, and prescriptive advice for those who want to recover as well as guidance for friends and family members seeking help for someone they love. Written from the unique perspective of a recovering addict who has helped thousands of people overcome addiction to alcohol and drugs Shares with readers for the first time in book form The Hills' world-renowned treatment program Tells Samuels' personal recovery story as the son of a prominent politician and businessman among the rich and famous in New York and Washington Contains a groundbreaking prescriptive program showing how to work each of the 12 steps Examines the cause of addictions, relapses, and fallback addictions Contains important information for family and friends of those struggling with addiction, including steps for intervention and healing The author appears regularly on TV

Download or read book Recovery written by Russell Brand and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to all kinds of addiction from a star who has struggled with heroin, alcohol, sex, fame, food and eBay, that will help addicts and their loved ones make the first steps into recovery “This manual for self-realization comes not from a mountain but from the mud...My qualification is not that I am better than you but I am worse.” —Russell Brand With a rare mix of honesty, humor, and compassion, comedian and movie star Russell Brand mines his own wild story and shares the advice and wisdom he has gained through his fourteen years of recovery. Brand speaks to those suffering along the full spectrum of addiction—from drugs, alcohol, caffeine, and sugar addictions to addictions to work, stress, bad relationships, digital media, and fame. Brand understands that addiction can take many shapes and sizes and how the process of staying clean, sane, and unhooked is a daily activity. He believes that the question is not “Why are you addicted?” but "What pain is your addiction masking? Why are you running—into the wrong job, the wrong life, the wrong person’s arms?" Russell has been in all the twelve-step fellowships going, he’s started his own men’s group, he’s a therapy regular and a practiced yogi—and while he’s worked on this material as part of his comedy and previous bestsellers, he’s never before shared the tools that really took him out of it, that keep him clean and clear. Here he provides not only a recovery plan, but an attempt to make sense of the ailing world.

Download or read book The Recovering written by Leslie Jamison and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams comes this transformative work showing that sometimes the recovery is more gripping than the addiction. With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself. Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction -- both her own and others' -- and examines what we want these stories to do and what happens when they fail us. All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement, and at the complicated bearing that race and class have on our understanding of who is criminal and who is ill. At the heart of the book is Jamison's ongoing conversation with literary and artistic geniuses whose lives and works were shaped by alcoholism and substance dependence, including John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Billie Holiday, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, and David Foster Wallace, as well as brilliant lesser-known figures such as George Cain, lost to obscurity but newly illuminated here. Through its unvarnished relation of Jamison's own ordeals, The Recovering also becomes a book about a different kind of dependency: the way our desires can make us all, as she puts it, "broken spigots of need." It's about the particular loneliness of the human experience-the craving for love that both devours us and shapes who we are. For her striking language and piercing observations, Jamison has been compared to such iconic writers as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, yet her utterly singular voice also offers something new. With enormous empathy and wisdom, Jamison has given us nothing less than the story of addiction and recovery in America writ large, a definitive and revelatory account that will resonate for years to come.

Download or read book Smacked written by Eilene Zimmerman and published by Random House. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A journalist pieces together the mysteries surrounding her ex-husband’s descent into drug addiction while trying to rebuild a life for her family, taking readers on an intimate journey into the world of white-collar drug abuse. “A rare combination of journalistic rigor, personal courage, and writerly grace.”—Bill Clegg, author of Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man Something was wrong with Peter. Eilene Zimmerman noticed that her ex-husband looked thin, seemed distracted, and was frequently absent from activities with their children. She thought he looked sick and needed to see a doctor, and indeed, he told her he had been diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. Yet in many ways, Peter seemed to have it all: a beautiful house by the beach, expensive cars, and other luxuries that came with an affluent life. Eilene assumed his odd behavior was due to stress and overwork—he was a senior partner at a prominent law firm and had been working more than sixty hours a week for the last twenty years. Although they were divorced, Eilene and Peter had been partners and friends for decades, so when she and her children were unable to reach Peter for several days, Eilene went to his house to see if he was OK. So begins Smacked, a brilliant and moving memoir of Eilene’s shocking discovery, one that sets her on a journey to find out how a man she knew for nearly thirty years became a drug addict, hiding it so well that neither she nor anyone else in his life suspected what was happening. Eilene discovers that Peter led a secret life, one that started with pills and ended with opioids, cocaine, and methamphetamine. He was also addicted to work; the last call Peter ever made was to dial in to a conference call. Eilene is determined to learn all she can about Peter’s hidden life, and also about drug addiction among ambitious, high-achieving professionals like him. Through extensive research and interviews, she presents a picture of drug dependence today in that moneyed, upwardly mobile world. She also embarks on a journey to re-create her life in the wake of loss, both of the person—and the relationship—that profoundly defined the woman she had become.

Download or read book I Want My Life Back written by Steve Hamilton and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2012-09-28 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One is too many. A thousand is never enough.' 'Andrea arrived in rehab at the same time as me. We were in admissions together. I can't remember how many times she'd tried to get clean, but it was my eleventh institution and I was dying. For two days I listened to her withdrawal in a room just down the passage from mine. The screaming, the swearing, the crying - and the hideous, desperate ka-klung! of the bars on the side of the bed as she wrestled with the restraints that kept her tied to it. I don't know what damage they thought she could have done really. Andrea had had all the tips of her fingers amputated. She'd got gangrene from shooting up under her nails too many times ...' At the age of fifteen I already had a criminal record, busted by the drug squad for possession of an illegal substance. You'd think I'd have learnt a lesson, wouldn't you, but I'm still learning, even though I'm clean of street drugs now - well, just for today - and have a lot of clean time behind me. The hardest lesson of all for an addict is that the nightmare is never over and the powerful seduction of just one more high never ever goes away. The story in these pages is not a comfortable one. It doesn't have an ending and I'm not even sure if it has a true beginning. Some of the time it may read like a bad dream. It isn't. It's my life you're holding in your hands. Don't let it be yours.

Download or read book Beautiful Things written by Hunter Biden and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hunter Biden recounts his descent into substance abuse and his tortuous path to sobriety. The story ends with where Hunter is today

Download or read book Rescued Lives written by Leonard A. Jason and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An effective treatment to help those with addictions Victims of drug addiction, chronic illness, and mental illness all too often are overwhelmed with the affliction called hopelessness. Oxford Houses succeed because their substance abuse treatment approach instills the most powerful medicine—hope for recovery. Rescued Lives: The Oxford House Approach to Substance Abuse provides a comprehensive thought-provoking look at just how the innovative Oxford House model inspires positive action on one of our country’s most serious problems—substance abuse. This powerful book presents the success stories of the people living in these community homes and explains just how it has worked for them. Rescued Lives: The Oxford House Approach to Substance Abuse gives an insightful review of Oxford House’s history and the development of the approach. Residents’ stories reveal the treatment process on the road to recovery, allowing readers to glimpse the path each individual must travel to gain entrance and assimilate into the House community. As the residents gain more control over themselves living substance free, the reader discovers the importance of relationships and reframing of self in the recovery process. This powerful book can provide hope to those individuals who feel they have lost themselves in alcohol, drugs, and mental illness. Foreword by substance abuse scholar Bill White. Topics in Rescued Lives: The Oxford House Approach to Substance Abuse include: • an overview of substance abuse in today’s society • a history of Oxford House to the present • substance abuse treatment approaches • the process of a resident’s entrance and assimilation • providing hope and living substance free • the nationwide expansion of Oxford Houses • recovery, and what it means to women, children, and families • criminal offenders in Oxford House • how the Oxford House model is constructed in order to help disenfranchised individuals from society • the nine Oxford House Traditions • a review of the strong evidence that Oxford House works —and why • and more! Rescued Lives: The Oxford House Approach to Substance Abuse is enlightening reading for educators and students of psychology, sociology, urban studies, education, and other courses designed to prepare students for careers in the helping professions. This book is also essential for practicing clinicians, anyone concerned with society’s problems and those impacted by substance abuse and mental illness.

Download or read book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts written by Gabor Maté, MD and published by North Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2011-06-28 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “thought-provoking and powerful” study that reframes everything you’ve been taught about addiction and recovery—from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Myth of Normal (Bruce Perry, author of The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog). A world-renowned trauma expert combines real-life stories with cutting-edge research to offer a holistic approach to understanding addiction—its origins, its place in society, and the importance of self-compassion in recovery. Based on Gabor Maté’s two decades of experience as a medical doctor and his groundbreaking work with people with addiction on Vancouver’s skid row, this #1 international bestseller radically re-envisions a much misunderstood condition by taking a compassionate approach to substance abuse and addiction recovery. In the same vein as Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts traces the root causes of addiction to childhood trauma and examines the pervasiveness of addiction in society. Dr. Maté presents addiction not as a discrete phenomenon confined to an unfortunate or weak-willed few, but as a continuum that runs throughout—and perhaps underpins—our society. It is not a medical “condition” distinct from the lives it affects but rather the result of a complex interplay among personal history, emotional and neurological development, brain chemistry, and the drugs and behaviors of addiction. Simplifying a wide array of brain and addiction research findings from around the globe, the book avoids glib self-help remedies, instead promoting a thorough and compassionate self-understanding as the first key to healing and wellness. Dr. Maté argues persuasively against contemporary health, social, and criminal justice policies toward addiction and how they perpetuate the War on Drugs. The mix of personal stories—including the author’s candid discussion of his own “high-status” addictive tendencies—and science with positive solutions makes the book equally useful for lay readers and professionals.

Download or read book The Man I Was Destined to Be written by Michael Tandoi and published by WestBow Press. This book was released on 2013-08 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Michael was twenty-seven years old, his lengthy battle with drug addiction resulted in a seven-year prison sentence. It would take three years and the death of his father before he realized that his former life prevented him from becoming the man his father hoped he would be. Walking the road to recovery enabled him to change his life and become the man he was destined to be.

Download or read book Ending Discrimination Against People with Mental and Substance Use Disorders written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2016-09-03 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Estimates indicate that as many as 1 in 4 Americans will experience a mental health problem or will misuse alcohol or drugs in their lifetimes. These disorders are among the most highly stigmatized health conditions in the United States, and they remain barriers to full participation in society in areas as basic as education, housing, and employment. Improving the lives of people with mental health and substance abuse disorders has been a priority in the United States for more than 50 years. The Community Mental Health Act of 1963 is considered a major turning point in America's efforts to improve behavioral healthcare. It ushered in an era of optimism and hope and laid the groundwork for the consumer movement and new models of recovery. The consumer movement gave voice to people with mental and substance use disorders and brought their perspectives and experience into national discussions about mental health. However over the same 50-year period, positive change in American public attitudes and beliefs about mental and substance use disorders has lagged behind these advances. Stigma is a complex social phenomenon based on a relationship between an attribute and a stereotype that assigns undesirable labels, qualities, and behaviors to a person with that attribute. Labeled individuals are then socially devalued, which leads to inequality and discrimination. This report contributes to national efforts to understand and change attitudes, beliefs and behaviors that can lead to stigma and discrimination. Changing stigma in a lasting way will require coordinated efforts, which are based on the best possible evidence, supported at the national level with multiyear funding, and planned and implemented by an effective coalition of representative stakeholders. Ending Discrimination Against People with Mental and Substance Use Disorders: The Evidence for Stigma Change explores stigma and discrimination faced by individuals with mental or substance use disorders and recommends effective strategies for reducing stigma and encouraging people to seek treatment and other supportive services. It offers a set of conclusions and recommendations about successful stigma change strategies and the research needed to inform and evaluate these efforts in the United States.