Topic: disease

But if a community treats a correctional institution as a kind of locked flophouse, what else we can expect?

Treatment is a formative time for a recovering addict—the ideas that seem to save us end up staying with us.

Epidemics do tend to end at some point, but they leave considerable destruction in their wake.

The experience of addiction routinely includes periods of reduced substance use, or abstinence.

Complex behaviors often require complex explanations.

Alcoholism has been around for nine or ten thousand years, but most of what science understands of brain function is less than eighty years old.

It makes us uncomfortable to acknowledge that degree of helplessness.

Ultimately, you are the only one that makes decisions about your life.

There’s a big difference between “knowing” that something is a disease, and actually treating it as one.

But to start opening those doors, someone has to be in the room — that is, they have to be identified (by themselves, preferably, but frequently by others such as the court system or family members) as possible/probable addicts.