If someone you love is suffering from a drug or alcohol addiction, you may wonder if they’ll ever be completely cured of the disease. While addiction can be effectively managed with treatment, it’s a chronic condition, and recovery is a lifelong process. Understanding the chronic nature of addiction can help you support your loved one’s ongoing...
Growing up as the famous son of George Hamilton and Alana Stewart wasn’t easy for Ashley Hamilton. The 40-year-old has survived his two failed marriages, a heroin addiction and struggles with anorexia and bulimia. Today, Ashley is eight years sober, an addiction coach, and living a different life, as seen on the new E! reality...
Addicts are all too aware of the difficulty involved in overcoming a serious substance abuse problem. There are withdrawal symptoms, detox, intensive therapies, triggers to manage and stress to cope with. It can be quite overwhelming. Yet there is profound joy throughout the addiction recovery process, and even its darkest moments, it can be illuminated...
You tell yourself you don’t have a drinking problem. You don’t drink every day, but when you do drink, you can really “put it away.” That’s OK, right? Wrong. Though occasional binge drinking may seem harmless, overindulging is responsible for 10,076 people being killed in 2013 in alcohol-impaired driving crashes, or nearly one-third of all...
Many individuals experience trauma during their lifetimes. Although many people exposed to traumatic situations demonstrate few or no lingering symptoms, those who have experienced repeated, chronic or multiple traumas are more likely to exhibit pronounced symptoms and consequences, including substance abuse, mental illness, and health problems. People of all ages, ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientations and...
The American Society of Addiction Medicine defines addiction as a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry. Dysfunction in these circuits leads to characteristic biological, psychological, social and spiritual manifestations. This dysfunction is reflected in an individual pathologically pursuing reward and/or relief by substance use and other behaviors. But what if...
