Showing titles in Drug Dependency

D'Anne Burwell's smart, athletic son - raised in a loving and prosperous home - begins abusing OxyContin as a teenager, and within a year drops out of college, walks out of rehab, and lands homeless on the streets of Boulder. Struggling with fear, guilt, and a desperate need to protect her son, D'Anne grapples with her husband's anger and her daughter's depression as the family disease of addiction impacts them all. She discovers the terrifying links between prescription-drug abuse and skyrocketing heroin use.

Allen Berger, PhD, draws on the teachings of Bill W. and psychotherapy pioneers to offer 12 hallmarks of emotional sobriety that, when practiced, give people the confidence to be accountable for their behavior, ask for what they want and need, and grow and develop a deeper trust in the process of life. These smart things include: understanding who you are and what's important to you; learning not to take others' reactions personally; trusting your inner compass; and taking responsibility for your reactions to problematic situations.

Journalist Jenny Valentish investigates the female experience of drugs and alcohol, using her own story to light the way. Mining the expertise of leading researchers, she explores the early predictors of addiction, such as childhood trauma and temperament, and teenage impulsivity. Drawing on neuroscience, she explains why other self-destructive behaviours - such as eating disorders and high-risk sex - are interchangeable with substance use.

At the age of 24, Jordan Barnes woke up next to a lifeless body, rifled through his dead friends’ pockets for any remaining heroin, and went right back to using. Strung out and homeless during the supposed best years of his life, there was no clear way out of the opioid crisis ravaging the streets of Portland, Oregon. But though Jordan had long accepted his fate, his parents still held out hope and would do everything in their power to get him the help he so desperately needed.

Do you use substances or engage in compulsive activities to regulate your mood? Do you reach for something sweet, a couple of drinks, or a pack of cigarettes after a difficult day because you can't unwind without them? Do you race to the stores to spend away the day's frustrations or run around in circles taking more time to get less done? If these self-defeating habits sound familiar, Emotional Sobriety will shed light on why and how these coping mechanisms threaten your health and impact resilience

Marcia, a young woman nearing twenty, is on her way to jail. She has been busted, again, this time for using heroin. As she passes buildings and bus stops that remind her of her childhood, she tries to recall what incidents led her to her dilemma. With barely a goodbye, her mother leaves her at the steps of the jail. Terrified, she is processed and placed in a new world—cell 6, bed 8. Unexpected Angels is a true account of a young woman, once an academic superstar, who is thrown into jail to await trial on a narcotics charge. At nineteen, she's already a three time loser. She must dig ...

On June 6, 2015, David and Jackie Siegel received the call that no parent should ever get. Their beautiful, vibrant, 18-year-old daughter Victoria had died of a drug overdose. The Siegels vowed to do whatever it takes to prevent this from happening to other parents.

This is the poignant life-and-death story of Johnny Stack, whose young and vibrant life ended by suicide after his descent into addiction to high-potency marijuana and cannabis-induced psychosis. You’ll laugh and cry with his mother, Laura Stack, as she retells the story of Johnny’s joyful childhood and then takes you through the unthinkable tragedy of his loss. It’s every parent’s nightmare. But this book is much more than Johnny’s story.

To grow in recovery, we must grow up emotionally. This means getting honest with ourselves and facing up to the self-defeating thoughts and actions that put our sobriety at risk. Although there are as many ways to mess up recovery as there are alcoholics and addicts, some general themes exist, which include: confusing self-concern with selfishness; not making amends; using the program to try to become perfect; not getting help for relationship troubles; and believing that life should be easy. Allen Berger explores the 12 most commonly confronted beliefs and attitudes that can sabotage recovery.

MDMA, often called Ecstasy or Molly, is an amazing medicine for treating everything from PTSD to anxiety and depression. This therapy has been proven to help thousands of people successfully heal from trauma, restore love in their relationships, and overcome their psychological challenges.

Newly updated in March 2022, this audiobook recognizes that despite laws and ad campaigns, people still use meth because it feels good. Ignorance and misplaced shame are by far the biggest factors that cause the meth user harm, thereby creating social and financial costs to communities everywhere. This audiobook is not intended to induce anybody to break laws to use meth. It is a recognition that numbers of people already use and so ends ignorance with 32 tips for safer use to make using meth as harm-free as possible.

Coming from a place of overwhelming compassion for both the addict and the parent, Patty provides a no-nonsense approach to instructing parents on healthier ways to navigate the challenges they face as the parent of a struggling child, whether the child is 14 or 54. She offers clear and concise dos and don'ts to help parents protect themselves from the ravages of this disease. She debunks terms like enabling, detachment, and self-care and guides parents through practical tools and behaviors to help them begin to find peace even if their child continues to struggle.

Part memoir, part 'how to', The Little Green Book will assist marijuana users, their loved ones, and those working with them in considering change. Michael Stratton is a therapist who fell in love with marijuana. Gradually it began to eclipse his goals that he'd set for himself. Eventually he found it necessary to break up with marijuana. He began working with others who had faced the same dilemma, and then became trained by SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) in the latest evidence based practices in helping people change.

As Melissa Bond raises her infant daughter and a special-needs one-year-old son, she suffers from unbearable insomnia, sleeping an hour or less each night. She loses her job as a journalist (a casualty of the 2008 recession), and her relationship with her husband grows distant. Her doctor casually prescribes benzodiazepines—a family of drugs that includes Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, Ativan—and increases her dosage regularly.

Past antidrug campaigns actually encouraged drug use. A few years ago, America stopped dropping acid altogether. The meth epidemic peaked a long, long time ago. NAFTA opened the border and created a bonanza for cocaine and meth traffickers just as President Clinton knew it would. President Reagan may have inadvertently caused the crack epidemic. Kids today are doing fewer illegal drugs than kids from any time in the recent past, and for a surprising reason.

Used for thousands of years by indigenous tribes of the Amazon rain forest, the mystical brew ayahuasca is now becoming increasingly popular in the West. Psychologist Rachel Harris here shares her own healing experiences and draws on her original research (the largest study of ayahuasca use in North America) into the powerful medicine's effects on depression, addiction, PTSD, and anxiety.

With dark humor, and in crystalline prose, Clune's account of life inside the heroin underground is like no other. Whisking us between the halves of his precarious double life-between the streets of Baltimore and the college classroom, where Clune is a graduate student teaching literature-we spiral along with him as he approaches rock bottom: from nodding off in a row house with a one-armed junkie and a murderous religious freak to having his life threatened in a Chicago jail while facing a felony possession charge.

One phone call. That's all it took to change Stephanie Wittels Wachs's life forever.... Her younger brother Harris, a star in the comedy world known for his work on shows like Parks and Recreation, had died of a heroin overdose. How do you make sense of such a tragic end to a life of so much hilarious brilliance? In beautiful, unsentimental, and surprisingly funny prose, Stephanie Wittels Wachs alternates between her brother's struggle with addiction, which she learned about three days before her wedding, and the first year after his death, in all its emotional devastation.

For decades, we've been hearing that alcoholism and addiction are incurable diseases, but The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure proves that this is a dangerous myth and that the label of "alcoholic" or "addict" destroys the promise of full recovery. Today, thousands are being freed from the old, limiting paradigms by using the groundbreaking approach spelled out in this book.

A searing confessional infused with the darkest humor, Permanent Midnight chronicles the opiated abyss of a Hollywood screenwriter and his formidable climb into sobriety. Made into a major motion picture starring Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, Permanent Midnight is revered by critics and an ever-growing cult of devoted fans as one of the most compelling contemporary memoirs.