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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

ONCE A MENSCH, ALWAYS A MENSCH – 

Feb. 4, 2021 – And then we walked two blocks up Eighth Avenue. We made a right on 24th Street and headed east. I went to my first 12-step meeting at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis’ David Geffen Center. I don’t remember much about the meeting except there were about a dozen men sitting in chairs in a circle. For the first time, I said, “My name is Marc, and I’m a crystal meth addict.”

That was almost 17 years ago. I have been clean and sober for seven and a half years. In other words, it took me about a decade to get long-term sobriety.

I have been an entertainment journalist for 25 years. Much of that time I was working in the “gossip biz,” with stints at the New York Daily News, Us Weekly, New York magazine, “Entertainment Tonight” and “E! News.”

I spent most of my waking hours reporting, writing and talking about the private lives of celebrities. I may have excelled at my job, but I was never fully comfortable prying. My uneasiness really took hold when I was active in my addiction. How could I ask celebrities (or their publicists) about their deepest, darkest secrets when I was living with one myself? I felt like a fraud, an impostor. I worried all the time about being found out.

In the summer of 2004, just weeks after Scott introduced me to Frank, I moved to Los Angeles to help launch the “Entertainment Tonight” companion series “The Insider.” Moving 3,000 miles across the country meant I could start over. Or so I thought. I told myself I would stop drinking and using, but I broke that promise within two weeks.

more@Variety

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

TOO QUIETLY! – 

Feb. 4, 2021 – The White House seems to have done little to alert media to the changes. Drug Policy Alliance* Director of Media Relations Matt Sutton told Filter that National Public Radio (NPR) was the only outlet to have received the statement to his knowledge. Other mainstream publications appear to have been left in the dark, he suggested. At publication time, the notice cannot be found on ONDCP’s website.

“While our nation grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, we must also face the addiction and overdose epidemic that affects communities all over the country,” Moreno said in the statement. “I’m honored to be working to implement President Biden’s agenda, which will focus on saving lives by prioritizing public health approaches to substance use disorder, while finding ways to confront historic racial inequities in drug policy.”

The other three priorities are as follows: “Advancing recovery-ready workplaces and expanding the addiction workforce,” “Supporting evidence-based prevention efforts, related to both supply and demand reduction,” and “Expanding access to evidence-based treatment, including by lifting burdensome restrictions on medications for opioid use disorder.”

more@FilterMag

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

SEEING THE LIGHT … IN PEANUTS – 

Feb. 6, 2021 – Andrew Heinz wrote in a 1999 profile of Rabbi Twerski for Judaism, the quarterly magazine of the American Jewish Congress. “He was moved by the example of men and women who would willingly be awakened in the middle of the night to go out and help a fellow alcoholic.”

He saw no contradiction between the 12 steps and his belief in the laws of Torah, according to his granddaughter Chaya Ruchie Waldman. “The 12 steps may have been created by Christian believers,” she said, “but it was about spirituality, surrendering to a higher power, and that is synonymous with Judaism.”

Rabbi Twerski melded an eclectic menu of treatments in his work as director of psychiatry at St. Francis Hospital in Pittsburgh. The Gateway Rehabilitation Center, which he founded, was named one of the top 12 rehabilitation clinics in the United States by Forbes magazine in 1987. He also wrote 80 books, many on Jewish topics but many others on addictive thinking and the addictive personality, all of which enhanced his international reputation as an authority on addiction.

more@NYTimes

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

TOO MUCH IS TOO MUCH

Feb. 8, 2021 – Work addiction is a clinical condition characterised by an obsessive and compulsive interest in work. People usually work more than they’re required to… characteristics include being concerned about their performance at work, rigid thinking and perfectionism, which is often projected onto others. 

more@TheConversation

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

EMPTY BOTTLES, FULL COFFINS – 

February 2, 2021 – Between January and September, 5,460 deaths were registered with this cause – up 16% on the same months in 2019.  It is the biggest toll recorded since records began in 2001. The high rates spanned the period during and after the first Covid lockdown, the Office for National Statistics figures show. It reached a peak of 12.8 deaths per 100,000 people in the first three months of 2020 and remained at this level through to September – higher than in any other time on record.  As in past years, rates of male alcohol-specific deaths were twice those seen for women. Experts say the coronavirus pandemic will have had little effect on how the data was gathered and recorded.  But it is not clear how much it may have contributed to the deaths. ONS spokesman Ben Humberstone said: “Today’s data shows that in the first three quarters of 2020, alcohol-specific deaths in England and Wales reached the highest level since the beginning of our data series, with April to September, during and after the first lockdown, seeing higher rates compared to the same period in previous years.” “The reasons for this are complex and it will take time before the impact the pandemic has had on alcohol-specific deaths is fully understood.”

more@BBC

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

IT’S OK, WE’VE GOT EYES IN THE BACK OF OUR HEADS – 

February 4, 2021 – And yet, the more I hear my patients use the term “burnout,” the more I think it doesn’t capture the depth of despair they describe.  To get another perspective on burnout, I spoke to Dr. Wendy Dean, a psychiatrist who has dedicated her career to fighting moral injury in physicians, which is the concept that systemic problems in the medical industry prevent doctors from doing what they know is right for their patients. Dr. Dean said what working moms are facing is not identical, but it’s similar, and a consequence of “our society’s decision to pursue profit at all cost.”  The crushing toll on working mothers’ mental health reflects a level of societal betrayal, according to Dr. Dean. “This isn’t burnout — this is societal choice,” she said. “It’s driving mothers to make decisions that nobody should ever have to make for their kids.”  “Betrayal” describes what my patients are feeling exactly. While burnout places the blame (and thus the responsibility) on the individual and tells working moms they aren’t resilient enough, betrayal points directly to the broken structures around them.

more@NYTimes

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

SPECIALIZE IN YOUR OWN LIFE – 

Dec. 30, 2021 – Journaling as inspiration for change could help you consider a new way of doing and thinking about things. Perhaps it will show you what the pandemic has taught you about yourself, your loved ones, or the universe. Or, you may begin to view the people in your life in an entirely different way.

The silver lining of the pandemic is that even though many lives have been lost, and there are increasing numbers of COVID-19 diagnoses, we’re living in a time when we’re able to access the most up-to-date statistics and medical updates. Sometimes we become overloaded by this type of information, though, so that’s the time to pause and do something else. And that’s when journaling can really come to the rescue.

more@PsychologyToday

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

BOTTOM LINES KILL PEOPLE – 

Feb. 3, 2021 – McKinsey’s extensive work with Purdue included advising it to focus on selling lucrative high-dose pills, the records show, even after the drugmaker pleaded guilty in 2007 to federal criminal charges that it had misled doctors and regulators about OxyContin’s risks. The firm also told Purdue that it could “band together” with other opioid makers to head off “strict treatment” by the Food and Drug Administration. Maura Healey, the Massachusetts attorney general, said the investigation of the firm involved reviewing “thousands and thousands of documents and emails” that, taken together, told “the story of McKinsey’s wrongdoing.”“Its always been about holding accountable those who created and profited off the opioid epidemic,” she said. Ms. Healey was the first state attorney general to investigate McKinsey’s business dealings with Purdue.

The consulting firm will not admit wrongdoing, according to the multistate settlement, but will agree to court-ordered restrictions on its work with some types of addictive narcotics. McKinsey will also retain emails for five years and disclose potential conflicts of interest when bidding for state contracts. And in a move similar to the tobacco industry settlements decades ago, it will put tens of thousands of pages of documents related to its opioid work onto a publicly available database.

more@NYTimes

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

IS ZOOM AA INFERIOR TO REAL AA MEETINGS? – 

Feb. 8, 2021 – In-person meetings also allow small acts of kindness – those mini-miracles that exemplify its members’ commitment to helping others – that don’t carry over to Zoom. For example, we’ve all seen a nervous newcomer fumble a freshly poured cup of coffee… only to have a half dozen regulars quickly assist with both comfort and clean-up.

All of this is lost over Zoom. This is why the best in-person meetings are inspiring and invigorating, while the best online meetings are a heaping pile of meh.

Another crucial difference is body language – those little non-verbal cues that, for example, let someone meandering through a rambling share know he should wrap it up. On a more positive note, the hoots, hollers and claps a newcomer receives for another day sober simply aren’t replicable online. Instead, we have a gridded screen of expressionless, often distracted faces.

This is a “takes one to help one” program whose effectiveness is severely diminished once physical togetherness is sacrificed. Even the glimmer gradually building in a newcomer’s eyes as he embraces the program – as he starts to “get it” – shines less brilliantly through a screen. 

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

TWEET THIS – 

February 6, 2021 – “Addicts” who changed their lives through digital detox confess that social media was killing them. Imagine that you’re a typical middle school student having dinner with your family. Your mother takes your smartphone away and puts it in a lockbox that won’t open for an hour.

Would you: (a) go ahead and eat dinner with your family? (b) try to pry open the box? or (c) smash the box with a heavy tool when your family is sufficiently distracted? The health-care industry has capitalized on this digital detox trend, depicting extreme use as the norm. Scholars, too, debate ways to define and prevent addiction to digital media.  It’s a mistake, however, to equate frequent social media use with addiction. Just the label carries stigma — a personal failing or pathology that has significant negative outcomes to the user and their family, such as lost jobs and destroyed relationships.

As researchers who study habits and social media use, we have found that excessive social media use can be a very strong habit. But that doesn’t make it an addiction.

Unlike addiction, frequent social media users sometimes benefit and sometimes suffer. That’s why a more accurate description is “habit.”

Habits form naturally through repeated use. Use any site or app enough, and you’ll form associations in memory between cues, such as site alerts and your smartphone, and responses, such as logging on. Once habits have formed, perception of cues automatically makes you think of logging on.

more@WashingtonPost

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