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Addiction Recovery Bulletin
Laughing your way to sobriety –
ooking back on the darkest moments of your life isn’t something most people enjoy doing. For the folks behind recovery meme accounts, though, it’s the source of some of their funniest jokes — and the inspiration some people need to start getting clean.
There are a number of ways to recover from the trauma of substance use disorder — including 12-step programs, medication, treatment centers and counseling. Rarely does one method work without the help of another, and of course, it’s never instant. With that in mind, humor also helps.
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Recovery meme accounts — often Instagram, Facebook or Twitter pages — poke fun at the horrors of addiction and the cliches that come along with it.
The power of ‘gallows humor’
Kat, who runs the Junkee Brewster account, told In The Know that she spends more time attending 12-step meetings and working within her community than she does making memes — and truthfully, she gets just as much joy from that hard work— but there’s something uniquely satisfying about being able to joke about the “addict lifestyle.”
“Humor allowed me to relate and feel a kinship to other people at a time when I thought I was the most uniquely flawed person on earth,” she said in an interview with In The Know. “I generally like to make memes that are inspired by the ridiculous thoughts and behaviors that I actually thought were reasonable when actively using, but highlight how outlandish and self-destructive they truly were.”
Sorry I’m late. Buying the drugs I need to function was just as convoluted and time consuming as it always is, and I was not expecting that.
— Junkee Brewster (@JunkeeBrewster) December 30, 2019
Kat also serves as an editor for Dank Recovery, one of the first recovery-centric meme pages to go viral. The account has more than 740,000 likes on Facebook and 90,000 followers on Instagram.
The man who created Dank Recovery, Timothy, said that as he was working a 12-step program, he and his friends were trying hard to be good, spiritual people — but they shared the same “messed up sense of humor” and knew they could safely make “inappropriate” jokes together in light of their recovery.
“Addiction causes a lot of trauma for a lot of people, myself included,” he told In The Know.
He said there are a number of topics that are stigmatized in the field of addiction recovery — using words like “junkie,” for instance. Sometimes, though, using politically incorrect terms and speaking frankly about the bleakness of addiction can actually help people face the stigma and shame of their current reality and move toward recovery.
“Some people say you shouldn’t make jokes about suboxone [a drug used to treat opiate addiction] because it’s a life-saving medication that shouldn’t be further stigmatized,” Timothy said. “I make 12-step memes to keep things fair and balanced. There are cliches in everything to make fun of.”
He told In The Know he recognizes that the so-called “gallows humor” of his page is not funny to everyone, but he doesn’t mind, because a lot of people relate to it. He recommended that people looking for more wholesome recovery content simply go to another page — or stay away altogether.
“It’s hard to keep a needle out of your arm. Talk to a doctor if a meme page is bothering you,” he said.
Kat, who runs the Junkee Brewster account, told In The Know that she spends more time attending 12-step meetings and working within her community than she does making memes — and truthfully, she gets just as much joy from that hard work— but there’s something uniquely satisfying about being able to joke about the “addict lifestyle.”
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