Category: From Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

ONE DREADFUL FILM – 

June 30, 2021 – Jarecki’s densely plotted thriller could just as well have been titled “Déjà vu,” given how tragically familiar it will probably feel to innumerable grieving families.

While “Crisis” can fairly be criticized as emotionally cold, with its heavy and humorless story generating more sympathy for its characters than empathy, there’s no denying its timeliness, offering a compelling look at what will certainly be remembered as one of the most underplayed tragedies of our time.

Ironically, Jarecki’s efforts to paint that picture for audiences has had to weather other crises on its way to release.

The COVID-19 pandemic shut down movie theaters — and pretty much everything else — in the year his film was slated to be released. Then there was the collateral damage from the emergence of jarring reports regarding Hammer’s bizarre alleged sexual (ahem) appetites, which appears to have shelved if not ended Hammer’s acting career.

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

MORE HELP IS NEEDED –   

June 24, 2021 – The duchess said she was “delighted” the two charities had taken “this bold step to join forces and help more people, families and children to overcome addiction”.

She added: “I have had the privilege of being patron of Action on Addiction for nine years, and have seen the work of The Forward Trust at HMP Send on several occasions.

“I am continually struck by the passion, expertise and commitment of the staff and volunteers, and indeed it was the conversations I had with individuals and families affected by addiction that have been a major driving force in my ongoing work on early childhood.

“With the link between early childhood trauma and addiction later in life becoming more widely understood, it is more important than ever that we focus on these issues so that we can create a happier, healthier, more nurturing society.”

[email protected]

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

WATCH – IT TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE – 

June 28, 2021 – Olivia Bender and Scott Sample chose recovery years ago. Now, they’re helping others choose it, too.

“We’re doing our part to bring it to our community that there is another way of life and it’s fun,” said Bender.

It is making a difference for the hundreds of people who interact with their videos every day.

“That is a blessing. It really is life-changing. We wake up with a purpose every day. It’s saving lives, it’s saving children, it’s saving parents,” said Bender. The two post videos weekly, including a men’s and women’s podcast and different recovery topics.

“Today’s topic is bipolar and addiction.”

And they give a platform for others to share their recovery journey.

It wasn’t an easy road getting here. For Scott, it was a heroin addiction and drug court. For Olivia, it was an arrest on drug charges.

more@WWNYTV

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

BIG PHARMA SKIMPS ON KICKBACKS? – 

June 30, 2021 – Disulfiram, sold under the trade name Antabuse, is the longest-known one. Its anti-alcohol properties were discovered by accident between the ‘40s and ‘50s, Einstein says. “People came in contact with disulfiram, and then they consumed alcohol and got horribly sick,” she says. “It creates a physical reaction in your body that just makes the consumption of alcohol really aversive.’

Naltrexone, sold under brand names including Vivitrol, is used in treating opioid use disorder in addition to AUD. Naltrexone blocks the brain’s new opioid receptors—the very receptors that make opioid drugs, and likely alcohol, rewarding. “The thought behind naltrexone is that it makes consuming alcohol a less pleasurable experience,” Einstein says. Rather than making someone physically sick like disulfiram, naltrexone blocks the the alcohol-related highs and pleasures.

Acamprosate, formerly sold under the brand name Campral, can help remove the discomfort experienced during withdrawal. It normalizes the transmission of the neurotransmitter glutamate in the brain, which can become dysregulated when a long-time drinker stops drinking. “If they have been drinking alcohol problematically for a long time, then that discomfort can be a reason to relapse,” Einstein says.

These medications are in no way a cure-all, Einstein says. For example, disulfiram may require supervised dosing, because someone can just not take the pill the day they decide to drink. Still, AUD medications can help, and should be prescribed in conjunction with other treatments such as counseling.

Spreading more awareness, Einstein says, can help in assisting treatments and reducing stigma. Remember: Addiction is not someone’s fault.

“Reasons that someone’s circuitry causes them to develop alcoholism might vary from person to person,” Einstein says. “It’s better to have more medications that are possible for conditions like this.”

Einstein emphasizes that taking these medications is not a cop-out. “Lingering and outdated ideas that taking a medication is similar to taking a substance, or that you’re replacing one addiction with another, is not the case,” she says. “That really strong negative attitude around taking medication for addiction can impede people from seeking care.”

more@VeryWellHealth

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

WATCH – WHO RUNS WHO? – 

June 21, 2021 – Though the WHO responded to the outcry by stressing that it “does not recommend abstinence of all women who are of an age at which they could become pregnant,” it continued by saying that “it does seek to raise awareness of the serious consequences that can result from drinking alcohol while pregnant, even when the pregnancy is not yet known.” Yet men who drink can damage fetuses — known or unknown — as well, but they aren’t mentioned in the WHO guidance. Unintentional though it might be, the implied message is that parenthood is a woman’s inevitable purpose rather than a life choice; that our needs come second to the needs of a baby yet to be born and a family we may or may not want to create; and that women are still not afforded the same bodily autonomy as the men who can impregnate us.

An April study of over 520,000 couples found a 35 percent increase in the risk of birth defects when a father drank alcohol regularly up to six months prior to conception. As the researchers wrote in JAMA, “Our finding suggests that future fathers should be encouraged to modify their alcohol intake before conceiving to reduce fetal risk,” noting how it “substantially elevated the risk of birth defects.”

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

DRIVING YOUNG PEOPLE IN OLD CARS TO MEETINGS? –   

June 30, 2021 – He was fortunate that he has no lasting health or legal repercussions from those years, though he had terrible credit for a while, and he has four kids by four different women (he only has a relationship with one of his children, he said).

“I was in that cycle for 30 years,” he said. “I’m an idiot. Actually, I’m hard-headed.”

But periodically over those years, Sewell was in recovery and became familiar with recovery houses, which is the more professional term for homes (many privately owned) where those in recovery live under various degrees of supervision before fully rejoining the world. Toward the end of that period, in 2010, as he slowly was pulling his life together, he started his car-repair business. He had started tinkering with restoring old cars when he was 15.

“When you get off the alcohol and drugs, there’s a void,” Sewell said. “I fill it with spiritual content, but I also go back to my roots. I had three tries in treatment, and my longest stretches of sobriety came when I was working on cars.”

more@Dispatch

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

SAFETY FIRST – 

July 1, 2021 – “If we are truly going to rein in the drug overdose epidemic, we must recognize drug addiction as the health problem it is, rather than as merely a crime,” Sen. Josh Miller, who chairs the Senate Committee on Health and Human Services said. “People who are addicted need help and protection from the most dangerous possibilities of addiction. Having a place where someone can save them from an overdose and where there are people offering them the resources they need for treatment is a much better alternative to people dying alone in their homes or their cars.”  Legislation approved by the state Senate Thursday creates a two-year pilot program to open the centers.

“The opioid epidemic has become a tremendous public health crisis, with overdoses of prescription and non-prescription opioids claiming a record number of lives,” Rep. John Edwards said. “Not only do harm reduction centers severely mitigate the chance of overdose, they are a gateway to treatment and rehabilitation of people with substance abuse disorder. These locations will be under the supervision of trained medical staff who can direct addicts toward substance use disorder treatment. It’s a way to tackle this epidemic while saving lives in the process.”

The bill now heads to Gov. Dan McKee as House lawmakers approved the measure earlier this week.

more@WPRI

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

STAYING ALIVE and WELL – 

July 2, 2021 – Baseball was his best ticket out of Vallejo, “a place where young Black kids did not get second chances,” he writes. Mr. Sabathia would have liked to have gone to college, but he couldn’t afford it even with a full scholarship. He earned a $1.3 million signing bonus as a first-draft pick for the Cleveland Indians in 1998, but he didn’t know how to take care of himself. Instead of cleaning his clothes, he bought more. He called his mother every day and Amber, his high-school sweetheart, most nights.

Twenty years old when he started playing for the Indians in 2001, Mr. Sabathia was the youngest rookie in the league. At first he was “definitely just a thrower,” he says, relying on his 95 mph fastball to simply “overpower” hitters. He says it took 10 or 12 years to become “a complete pitcher,” able to size up batters and know when to throw a slider, a cutter or a change-up. “You always have to be trying to get better,” he says. “That was how I was able to pitch for 19 years,” even after his fastballs had slowed down.

Mr. Sabathia spent 2008 with the Milwaukee Brewers, and the experience was revelatory: Being on a team with five other Black players, he realized how lonely he had been in Cleveland, where he was often the only one on the roster. “To be Black in America is to constantly be on guard,” he writes in “Till the End.” The share of African-Americans in baseball has been declining for decades, not least because there are far more scholarships available in football and basketball. Mr. Sabathia now helps to lead MLB’s Players Alliance, which was founded last year to help get more Black Americans in baseball at all levels.

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

MOTLEY NO MORE – 

July 2, 2021 – And do you know what you’re gonna do? YOU’RE GONNA STAY SOBER ONE DAY AT A TIME. You are the miracle, the one that breaks the addiction chain, the one who is a living amens. The one who has altered your family history. You will live in gratitude for those that never thought you’d stay sober or make it out alive BECAUSE THEY MADE YOU STRONGER and you know how to forgive assholes. And when you see people who are still suffering / treading water or gasping for air, be sure to throw them a life vest. Because we give back now to those that are still afflicted and hope they too pass it on.#SobrietyRocks #20Years”.

Sixx struggled with substance abuse for years and was even supposedly declared clinically dead after a heroin overdose in 1987 made his heart stop for two minutes. He has since become actively involved in a recovery “program,” which he credits for helping him transform his life and relationships.

“By letting go of self and ego, working a program that connects you to a higher power and giving back to those still struggling are just some of the important things you learn through sobriety,” Sixx wrote when he celebrated nine years of sobriety in July 2013. “You get to repair the damage done from drink, drugs and horrific behaviors (that broke people’s hearts who loved you.”

The rocker, who detailed his near-fatal drug addiction in the best-selling book “The Heroin Diaries”, added: “For me, taking away the substance just gave [me] an honest view of who I had become and then the healing started. I do believe without any program to help, many are just dry drunks and there is always a danger of them going out again. I’ve been there. It’s not pretty. This is no joking matter to me, so I take it seriously.”

Asked by The Guardian about a diary entry in “The Heroin Diaries” where he described himself as an “alcoholic heroin and coke addict getting into pills” and how he spent Christmas Day 1986 naked under the Christmas tree, clutching a shotgun, Nikki said: “Well, if you shoot enough cocaine, you go into a kind of psychosis, and I believed people were coming to get me. Scary place, let me tell you. It reads like some kind of a dark horror story or bedtime thriller. But in real life, the trauma that psychosis puts your body through is on a cellular level. You believe that you’re going to have an experience even though it’s not really happening. I can remember those, because you come out of them, and it’s scary. But you can only imagine what it would be like to be insane and not come out of it, or a version of that, like dementia.”

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

FEAR OF UNMASKING –   

June 30, 2021 – That’s not all. Violent crime is up, historic heat waves are devastating areas of the country not prepared to cope, and mental health practitioners can’t keep up with the demand for services.

“I think for many people this ‘return to normal’ feels awfully abrupt and jarring,” Carpenter said, adding that the pandemic has been an incredibly difficult period, “with lots of opportunity for confusion, for disagreement, and for discord.” 

She continued, “It’s a real mixed bag. While many will experience much of this reopening as positive, there is a subset of people that will really struggle with how to move out of this very challenging time.”  “When your frontal lobe is tired from doing emotional regulation on steroids for a year and a half, you’re not as good at it,” she added. “You could even be at your breaking point.”

If, however, you find yourself giddy with relief and ready to act as if there was no pandemic to worry about, that too makes neurological sense, said Dr. Bruce Wexler, a senior research scientist in psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine.

“Humans are the only animals that shape the environment that shapes our brains and we function and feel better when there’s a fit between the two,” said Wexler, who has studied brain plasticity for more than 35 years.

“Every day we strive to renew ourselves by reconnecting with the familiar faces and places that shaped us and are inside of us. That’s one of the reasons people were so agitated about wanting to go back to their favorite bars and hangouts,” Wexler added.

When he realized that motivation, Wexler said, “I had more sympathy for the people who were complaining ‘Open up, open up!’ I could understand their urgency.” 

Safely getting back to normal, in whatever shape that currently looks like, will require being fully vaccinated and adhering to the latest social distancing requirements of local communities and businesses, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Coping with anxiety, tension or worry about risky pandemic behaviors — both our own and those of other people — will take a combination of self-care and compassion, experts say.

“We all have to give ourselves a little grace,” Carpenter said. “It’s really important that we try not to judge ourselves for our emotional response to this change. This is objectively really stressful and to have some combination of relief, happiness, fear, or maybe even some anger and frustration is normal.”

more@CNN

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