Stigma Bracelet? – May 19, 2020 – The scheme has already been trialled in Humberside, Lincolnshire, North Yorkshire and London. During pilot schemes those who wore the tags were alcohol free 97% of the time, the Ministry of Justice said. It says it expects 2,300 tags to be fitted to offenders every year. Crime, policing and justice minister Kit Malthouse said the new tagging system will not only punish offenders but “can help turn their lives around”. The measures will be rolled out this winter. @BBC
Author: Leonard Buschel
Recovery Coaches Connect! – May 21, 2020 – The intention of this new team of recovery coaches is to bring folks out of a detached state and provide them with comfort and resources. Coaches will provide access to support services for those who are in the dark, and will help those who are already in a recovery program stay tethered to that essential assistance. “The opposite of addiction is connection, so we need to stay connected with each other now more than ever,” Morris said. The recovery coach training program has been on-Island for four years, but it wasn’t until…
Keep it simple simian – May20, 2020 – A group of scientists from the University of Utah and Stanford University succeeded in controlling the choice behaviours of two monkeys by targeting specific parts of their brains with ultrasound waves, according to a research paper published on Wednesday by the journal Science Advances. The team delivered inaudible, high frequency sound waves to the brains of the two animals by means of a non-invasive instrument similar to an ultrasound wand used in medical scans. The researchers placed the two monkeys in front of a screen displaying a target in the center, along…
THIS is America – May 5, 2020 – “Yes, I’m very aware public hanging is extreme and totally not possible without Federal Approvals and not from city or state officials. Extreme yes, but definitely brings attention to this scourge on Sylacauga, Alabama and the United States of America.” James added that drugs like fentanyl, meth, cocaine, crack and heroin are increasingly being “dumped on Americans from Asia and South America” and expressed concerns at entire families are being destroyed “because we’ve given up on the so called ‘War on Drugs.’” @Newsweek
Checking in… – May 23, 2020 – After not posting on Instagram for a couple of months, the former What a Girl Wants star gave fans an update on her life. Sharing a selfie, in which she’s seen wearing a white shirt and still rocking her dark locks, Bynes wrote that she had been in treatment for the “last two months” and is ready to keep working on herself. Bynes noted that she’s getting her bachelor’s degree from Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM), working on her clothing line and still engaged to her fiancé, Paul Michael. “Taking online…
Meaning! What does it mean? – Nov 16, 2018 – In this exclusive interview with Rebel Wisdom he talks about how social media has created a whole new area for addictive behaviour, how traumatised leaders have created unhealthy societies and what he makes of the internet sensation and fellow Canadian intellectual Jordan Peterson. To see the second part of the interview, ‘Addiction and psychedelic therapy’, and many other great films, become a Rebel Wisdom patron: https://www.patreon.com/rebelwisdom @YouTube
Reset? – May 11, 2020 – “It wasn’t a conscious choice,” he said a few days later, during a FaceTime call from his home. “I just drank it without realizing what I was doing.” He quickly called Shires, who was in the barn that sits on their property about 100 yards from their house. “I was concerned but not enough to be like, ‘Call somebody,’” Shires explained via a separate FaceTime call from the barn. “I said, “If today’s going to be the day, let’s find you a real nice bottle because I’m not going to let you just have…
MEDIA: Book Suggestion – May 23, 2020 – In 1995, a decade before Mikel Jollett became the frontman of the indie rock band the Toxic Airborne Event, he was a 20-year-old Stanford student enrolled in the university’s popular Psychology of Mind Control course taught by Philip Zimbardo (of Stanford Prison Experiment fame). Jollett remembers devouring the entire syllabus, reading about Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple and Vietnam prisoner-of-war camps and thinking, “It all feels familiar, like reading your own family history,” the singer-songwriter and former music journalist writes in his mesmerizing new memoir, “Hollywood Park,” out Tuesday, May 26. Unlike most…
All the right reasons… – May 22, 2020 – Back in 2013, Disick’s mother passed away due to an illness that she had been battling with prior to her death. Only three months after his mother’s funeral, Disick lost his father due to cancer. Because Disick is an only child, he did not have any siblings or many other family members that he could turn to for comfort when he lost his parents. The loss of his parents has always been a sensitive subject for him to talk about with others, so instead, he bottled up his sadness and tried…
Smart Interview – May 18, 2020 – Host Morra Aarons-Mele speaks with MIT’s Seth Mnookin, a writer and ex-addict who has been clean for 20 years. And later in the show, we’ll also learn about treatment for substance abuse with Dr. Zev Schuman-Olivier, an addiction psychiatrist who focuses on mindfulness as a path to healing. HBR Presents is a network of podcasts curated by HBR editors, bringing you the best business ideas from the leading minds in management. The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of…
Harm Reduction Works! – May 21st 2020 – Doctor Ben Miller is the Chief Strategy Officer for well being trust, he says the numbers are encouraging: “I think the one thing that we do take away is we have seen vast improvement in how opioids are being addressed in this country; That the nation really perused aggressive ways to crack down on opioid prescribing and ways to treat addiction for opioids.” In terms of the impact that the pandemic may have on the study, Doctor Miller says it could take as long as two years to quantify and comprehend the…
Tragic Ending – May 17, 2020 – According to Marlyse, “The Flash” star struggled with addiction for three years. The family kept it a secret, but this time, she wants to help bring awareness to the opioid addiction epidemic. “His death is not going to be in vain,” Marlyse said. “He’s going to help a lot of people down the road.” According to Marlyse, she didn’t know when her son started taking fentanyl. Also, as his addiction progressed, he was in complete denial about it because he felt too ashamed to share it. @IBTimes
No Harm, No Foul – May 19, 2020 – Meghan Hetfield, who works in family planning and peer recovery in Catskill, New York, told Filter that she found the answer just before the virus swept across North America. “I used to utilize 12-step support groups at different times in my personal recovery and I really missed that human connection and that community that I had when I was attending those meetings,” she began. “I’ve really missed that aspect of my life. And yet, philosophically, I’m feeling a little bit differently now than the 12 Steps.” Listening to the drug policy…
Time to use your spiritualize? – May 22, 2020 – 2. Principles Before Personalities: Oh boy, this is one recovery concept that I have to remind myself to practice often because any time that I fall short to practice it, I end up just hurting myself in the long run. Principles before personalities essentially means to remember to put your core values into practice before jumping to react in response to someone elses’s personality. For instance, if someone does me wrong I am not going to react in anger, I am going to respond in love, I might even pray…
How Not to Transcend Recovery… – May 22, 2020 – He started only 18 games with the Chargers, going 4-14 with 13 touchdowns and 33 interceptions. Leaf finished his career in Dallas in 2001, going 0-3 with one touchdown and three interceptions. Leaf, 44, has openly talked about his personal problems, which included an addiction to prescription pain medicine and his multiple arrests on burglary and drug charges. His release from prison in 2014 marked the last time he had been behind bars. @NBCSports
Knowing exactly what steps to take… – May 19, 2020 – I think anybody who gets sober has the thought, “This is the worst time to get sober.” Because you don’t want to. When I was trying to get sober, I had this fantasy that the world would stop and the bars would close and that nobody could be on the sidewalk cafes drinking so that I wouldn’t be forced to look at everyone else’s happiness. I felt like I’d been pushed off the party barge and everybody got to keep moving. Whatever strange circumstances have brought us to this…
Lowering the Bottom – MAY 19, 2020 – EJ: Have you experienced that the pandemic is pushing people towards addiction who haven’t struggled with it before? TR: It’s pushing people towards it, because what’s happening is, take the husband or wife or the twenty-some-year-old that would get home from work, maybe have a few drinks. Well, now they’re isolating at home, working through Zoom, starting to drink at three o’clock, starting to drink at one, starting to drink at ten in the morning. People are self-medicating due to the quarantine. And they’re drinking more, and abusing more, and relapses are…
Surfing on Denial – MAY 22, 2020 – Although his death came as a shock for the public, in-the-know members of the surfing world were less surprised: Irons had been self-medicating with drugs, particularly opioids, for years. “It was obviously huge news in the surf industry,” Todd Jones, the co-director of Andy Irons: Kissed by God, tells InsideHook. “It was also international news and was all over CNN. There were a lot of unknowns when he died and the family blocked the coroner’s autopsy. There was all this talk of dengue fever being the cause of death, and there were…
He said, He said – May 08, 2020 – Scott is planning on suing All Points North Lodge, a Colorado rehab center, for this breach of privacy. His lawyer Marty Singer told TMZ, “In an effort to finally come to terms and deal with the pain that Scott has been silently suffering for many years due to the sudden death of his mother, followed by the death of his father 3 months later, Scott made the decision to check himself into a rehab facility last week to work on his past traumas.” He referred to the photo as “an outrageous…
Doing the best we can! – May 24, 2020 – Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is continuing its mission of helping those struggling with substance abuse move past their addiction. @YouTube
What’s Going on? Pandemic: 2020. @YouTube
Please, no contempt prior to investigation – March 9, 1990 – 38. Be aware of the Network. We live by a network of connections and links. Your connection to yourself, to your intimates, to your place, to the collective, to the planet, to the Infinite. (Each is a distinct connection.) Equally powerful are the collective’s connections to you (not at all the same as yours to it), to groups of intimates, to itself, to the planet, to the Infinite. All these levels and connections interweave. All are equally important. All the links or connective points of this network (call them…
“The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.” —J. Krisnamurti
Doors to Ms.Perception – May 12, 2020 – It’s not that simple for people with eating disorders. For someone with an active eating disorder, food can be an agent of destruction. For someone in recovery, isolation can prompt a shift to old coping mechanisms. Eating disorder outreach has risen online: On Instagram, @covid19eatingsupport provides “meal support” — somebody to eat with. The National Eating Disorders Associationoffers video sessions that explore subjects such as family dynamics during quarantine and eating disorders during midlife.(I) can’t get away from food online, where it’s more present than ever: Sourdough starters and bean shortages and…
Use Your Head – May 12, 2020 – Those who drank alcohol then quit in the first trimester had an average of nine drinks during that time period. A low level of alcohol is defined for the study’s purposes as two standard drinks on average during the first trimester. A moderate or high level meant, on average, 36 drinks during the first trimester, 16 in the second trimester and eight in the third trimester. (The authors didn’t have enough participants to split between moderate and high level groups, so they combined them.) For smokers, 14 cigarettes on average in each…
Tell It! – May 12, 2020 – In the last couple of years, as he’s started seeing a therapist weekly, he’s made another stride. He’s able to think about the man he was before all that – and let his guard down. “To get to a certain level as a creative person, you have to have an open mind. And that doesn’t usually allow you to point the finger and blame large groups of people. And if you can’t blame large groups of people, then you’re not gonna make a very good conservative. I know they’re out there, and you…
It starts with obsessiveness – May 8, 2020 – This has particularly affected how we provide mental health and substance use care. A recent McKinsey report on resilience found that 63 percent of respondents to a National Consumer Survey in late March reported feeling anxious or depressed in the past week, and 1 out of 4 reported binge drinking at least once (more than 4 drinks for women or 5 drinks for men in a single sitting) in the past week (up from 1 in 6 in a recent CDC analysis). Leading digital coaching and therapy providers such as Talkspace…
Oh, What a World It Would Be – May 12, 2020 – I’m tired of reading about people being arrested for exhibiting symptoms of a medical condition. I’m frustrated by complacency in light of incremental “progress.” I’m heartbroken by all the obituaries of people dying preventable deaths… May 12, 2020 – What if we decided, collectively, to end the opioid/overdose crisis? What would that look like? 1. Legalize overdose prevention sites. Passing a bill at the state level doesn’t mandate we save lives. This legislation wouldn’t require spending. Instead, this change would signal to municipalities and nonprofit organizations that should…
Inpatient takes on new meaning – May 15, 2020 – “You don’t know what’s in a tea bag until you put it in hot water,” says Popa-Erwin, who says many of her clients are working to kick their bad habits during quarantine. “For the first time in a long time, people are [looking] inward.” After receiving 16 stitches, Parra still partied the next day. “It was just a cycle that progressively got worse,” he says. Sometimes he’d wake up to videos on social media showing him “acting ridiculously obnoxious, slurring words [with my] eyes barely open.” By the beginning of…
It’s still a WE program! – May 14, 2020 – Amy Samuel-Meda, a recovery coach at Scottsdale Recovery Center, said she has seen a spike in the number of substance-abuse cases since the state’s stay-at-home order went into effect in March. Samuel-Meda credits an abrupt change in routine and lost support systems for the sharp uptick in cases. A lot of facilities no longer offer traditional outpatient treatment programs either, she added. “A lot of the support that people would use to get and stay sober had not been available,” Samuel-Meda said. Samuel-Meda said many addicts rely on recreational activities…