If you’ve made the decision to get help for drug or alcohol abuse, you’ve conquered one of the toughest challenges on the road to recovery. Before you begin your journey of learning how to live a sober lifestyle, you need to have a clean, substance-free system. Most addiction treatment programs begin with a medically-supervised detox to...
Your loved one is addicted to drugs and/or alcohol and you are an emotional wreck. You feel a mix of guilt and shame and anger about their addiction, but at the same time, you are terrified that they will hurt themselves or someone else or even die. You notice jewelry or money is missing. The...
Four Californians aged 18 to 24 have died at music festivals in the last 15 months. The latest victims were two young women attending the two-day Hard Summer Music Festival held this past weekend at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds in Pomona, CA. The two girls, Tracy Nguyen, 18, and Katie Dix, 19, died from...
There are some addiction rehab centers that insist they can cure alcohol and drug addiction. Is this claim realistic? Can drug and/or alcohol addiction be permanently cured? Extensive research attributes addiction largely to changes in brain structure and function. Because these changes make it much harder for the addict to control substance use, health experts...
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...
Whitney Houston poses with Bobbi prior to her death Credit: Kevin Mazur/AMA2009/WireImage It seems like she never had a chance. Born to two crack-addicted parents, Bobbi Kristina Brown, who died July 26, 2015, most likely was not taught the life-skills needed to overcome her genetics and her environment. Even without the complication of substance abuse,...
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...
New drug buprenorphine helps opiate addicts. It is safe and effective and it is being more widely used but the problem is an increase in the accidental exposure of this drug to children. These kids are at serious risk for injury or death, according to researchers at the Utah Poison Control Center (UPCC), U School...
