Category: From Addiction Recovery Bulletin

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

NO MORE BUTTER – 

March 12, 2025 – The top 20% of high-income, college-educated Americans have less heart disease risk than others, and this gap has widened over the past two decades. Life expectancy for the richest 1% of Americans is now 10 years higher than for the poorest 1%. 

For this study, researchers analyzed 20 years of data gathered from nearly 50,000 participants in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey between 1999 and 2018.

Researchers cited a number of reasons why more well-to-do people have an advantage when it comes to heart health.

Poorer folks might suffer from more stress due to their economic insecurity, while higher-income or better-educated people might have more access to healthy behaviors and activities throughout their lives, researchers said.

The well-to-do also might be better at taking prescribed medicines, have less exposure to environmental toxins and might benefit from stronger support systems, Abdalla said.

CONTINUE@UPI

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

STICK WITH THE WINNERS! – 

March 18, 2025 – David Cohen, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, is the Clinical Director and COO at Harmony Place in Woodland Hills, CA. Since 2003, he’s been a leader in addiction and co-occurring disorder treatment, advocating for ethical recovery practices while mentoring clients, clinicians, and students on their recovery journey.

Q. If you are in recovery, what was your drug(s) of choice and when is your sobriety date?

A. Heroin and anything I could get my hands on…Clean and sober since 12/12/1996.

Q. What do you like most about 12-step meetings?

A. I love all types of twelve step meetings, but I especially like men’s meetings and meetings that focus on learning and studying the Big Book. I also love that I can go to a meeting anywhere in the world and feel like I have a family.

Q. Do you think addiction is an illness, disease, a choice, or a wicked twist of fate?

A. I believe that addiction is disease of the heart and spirit that manifests with self-destructive behaviors including compulsive drug and alcohol use which inevitably changes our cell structure, brain chemistry and overall outlook, making recovery very complex and multi-faceted.

CONTINUE@AddictionRecoveryeBulletin

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

LUCY IN THE SOBER SKY – 

March 11, 2025 – After Dwayne Wade opened up about his emotional journey surviving kidney cancer on Today With Jenna & Friends, he and Jenna Bush Hager invited Lucy Hale to share why she went public about her sobriety.

Hale, who is now three years sober, said her desire to share her story came from wanting to be authentic to herself.

“I just wanted to show up as myself and I tried to run away from that for so long and I was just tired,” she told Wade and Bush Hager. “And so when I started openly speaking about it, I had no idea it was going to connect with people in the way that it did.”

She continued, “To me, being sober is so much more than just not drinking alcohol and doing drugs, it’s being able to show up as me, and being really present and being of service to others. It’s felt very easy to share my story and connect with people.”

Bush Hager then asked if it felt like she had “come home” to a younger version of herself, which Hale completely agreed with.

CONTINUE@MSN

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

WROTE BEST-SELLING BOOKS – 

March 7, 2025 – Her experiences as a drug addict, a chemical dependency counselor and the wife of an alcoholic informed a best-selling book about codependence that has guided countless people to shed toxic relationships, died on Feb. 27 in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. She was 76.

Her daughter, Nichole Beattie, said the cause was heart failure. She had been hospitalized from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12, then evacuated from her home in Malibu because of a wildfire and moved into her daughter’s home, where she died.

CONTINUE@NYTimes

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

NEW DOCUMENTARY – 

March 12, 2025 – Benjamin Flaherty spent three years shooting “Shuffle,” a documentary that follows three addicts who are trying to stay alive in rehab facilities that are scamming insurance companies. Flaherty reveals that patients are being bought and sold for their insurance policies…and ushered into a cycle of care designed to keep them sick. With the help of an FBI informant, an insurance analyst, and the former executive director of a Philadelphia-based treatment facility, the director uncovers collusion at the highest levels of government.

Flaherty, who uses his personal journey of recovery from addiction as a way into the 82-minute doc, unravels a web of public policy and private interest preying on a desperate population for the sake of profit. 

“I was only a few months sober when I heard a story about people being lured into sober homes for their insurance policies,” he says.

CONTINUE@Variety

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

AND MAKE YOU HAPPY –

March 3, 2025 – How far away is your phone right now? When did you last look at it? For many of us, these digital devices are almost constantly in our hands, and a new study highlights the effects on brain activity that can happen when we cut back on using them.

The research involved 25 young adults aged between 18 and 30, who were asked to restrict their smartphone use as much as possible for 72 hours: Only essential communications and work-related activities were allowed.

Researchers from Heidelberg University and the University of Cologne in Germany used magnetic resonance imaging ( MRI) scans and psychological tests before and after the phone diet to determine what kind of effect this had on neural patterns and activity.

“We used a longitudinal approach to investigate effects of smartphone restriction in smartphone users,” write the researchers in their published paper.

“Associations between changes of brain activation over time and addiction-related neurotransmitter systems were found.”

CONTINUE@ScienceAlert

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

HOW IT WORKS –

March 7, 2025 – Svenja, age 24, works at an artificial intelligence (AI) startup in Berlin, Germany. She is also Germany’s first content creator for sober living. Growing up in the north of the country, drinking alcohol seemed like the norm. Yet Svenja realized that alcohol was damaging her physical and mental health. Two years ago, she made the decision to stop drinking for good.

“I just stopped. There was no transition period. I woke up one morning and just decided I wouldn’t do it anymore. I haven’t had a single sip since!”

Challenging societal norms

Svenja recalls, “I had my first sip of alcohol when I was 13 years old. I drank all the way up until I was about 22. When you grow up in the countryside in Germany, it is just a very normal thing to do – to drink with your peers and with your families. You do it because otherwise you will be seen as weird or an outsider.”

She reflects on the societal norms she grew up with: “Growing up, having your first hangover is almost expected of you. It is weirdly romanticized in our culture.”

CONTINUE@WHO

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

BOSOM BUDDIES – 

March 11, 2025 – The actress, 71, opened up to Christina Applegate and Jamie-Lynn Sigler on the March 11 episode of their podcast, MeSsy, saying she “started using drugs and alcohol when I was really young, when I was 15.” “I’m a person that for probably the first 30 years of my life, didn’t deal [with] s—t,” said Sagal.  “I medicated myself to where I didn’t really deal with my emotion. My parents died, I had cancer in my 20s, I mean, a bunch of s—t happened, and I didn’t really deal with it. And then, you know, I stopped medicating myself, and now I have no choice but to deal with it.” Sagal referenced Applegate and Sigler’s struggles with the chronic immune disorder multiple sclerosis, saying, “I’m sure as you deal with a life-threatening illness — which as an alcoholic, I deal with a life-threatening illness — it brings into the forefront of your brain your own mortality,” Sagal said.

CONTINUE@People

The post Katey Sagal Tells Christina Applegate: Life-Threatening Alcoholism ‘Burned Down’ Her Music Career appeared first on Addiction/Recovery eBulletin.

Addiction Recovery Bulletin

BOOK SUGGESTION – 

Publication Date, March 4, 2025 – Deserted by her dad, the folk singer legend Donovan, Skye was a ninth-grade dropout who sought solace and validation in the eyes of audiences and dreamy costars like Keanu Reeves, River Phoenix, Matthew Perry, John Cusack, and Robert Downey Jr. Skye’s greatest weakness was musicians. On the heels of a toxic relationship with the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis, which began when she was just sixteen and he was twenty-four, the actress leapt into wedded bliss with her first great love, Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz. But marriage was not the magical hall pass to adulthood Skye had imagined. Awakening to her bisexuality and desperately insecure, she risked her fairytale marriage for a string of affairs with gorgeous nineties “bad girls.” The dream marriage imploded, and Skye’s trust in herself and her future along with it.

Set against a backdrop of rock royalty compounds, supermodel cliques, and classic late-century films like River’s Edge, Gas Food Lodging, and Wayne’s World, Say Everything is a wild ride of Hollywood thrills as well as a lyrical reflection on ambition, intimacy, and a messy, sexy, unconventional life.

CONTINUE@Amazon

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

AUDIO – LOST AND FOUND – 

March 10, 2025 – (Elena and Vadim live on the street) “This is not a blip. We are on track to return to levels of [fatal] overdose before fentanyl emerge.”  Overall drug deaths in the U.S. are down roughly a quarter, according to provisional CDC data. That includes fentanyl and other illicit drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine.

Dr. Nora Volkow, head of the U.S. government’s National Institute on Drug Abuse, said the decline in fatal overdoses linked to fentanyl is even greater.

Drug deaths in the U.S. have now dropped from a peak of 114,000 in August 2023 to just under 87,000, according to the latest provisional data from September 2024 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, where drug use has long been a widespread public health concern, many people told NPR they believe the situation has improved. “I can tell, you know, the numbers [of people dying] dropped a lot,” said Elena, who regularly smokes fentanyl and xylazine, also known as tranq.

NPR agreed not to use the last names of people who were interviewed about their drug use because the activity is illegal under state and federal law.

CONTINUE@NPR

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