Thinking About Addiction

As a general rule, the better the causes of a disease are understood, the more effective the treatments will be.

Informed client choice means accurate information about the likely outcome of decisions made early in treatment.

It isn’t that big a challenge; you simply add a basic questionnaire on the subject to your intake paperwork.

Recovery-friendly communities encourage education, provide support for open communications, and reject assumptions that perpetuate stigma.

Like many rural areas, Taos County sees high rates of shockingly young students taking to heroin and alcohol. And like most of New Mexico, infrastructure and resources are stretched thin.

If we could reach them now, the process might well be interrupted. Preventing a host of more serious problems — some of them fatal to other people, or the user himself.

It may help in understanding how the problems that plague some of us throughout life may have come about. And hopefully, in doing so, remove a bit the shame and stigma that often accompanies such problems.

Diabetics and heart patients are asked to make changes in lifestyle to reduce the risk of future crisis. Therapy is sometimes used to support those changes.

Imagine a student sitting in the school auditorium listening to a teacher or police officer insist that cannabis makes you less intelligent. Meanwhile, he knows that the kid in front of him, an honor student, smokes pot every weekend.

Suffering victim and destructive asshole, all wound up in the same person. That’s the “alcoholic/addictive” personality. But who is the “real person” underneath the disease?