Don’t scuba dive alone… – March 27, 2020 – But quitting is not impossible, though it is hard and may take several tries. Success doesn’t come from wishing and wanting, but finally realizing that you need to change because the addiction is interfering too much with something you value. Addiction becomes a competing action to something you no longer wish to risk or destroy. This desire sparks momentum. And with that momentum comes the confidence to take first steps and keep going, no matter what. So, how do you get started? Treatment centers and 12-step programs are not the only…
Author: Leonard Buschel
I’m in the right hand corner – MARCH 24, 2020 – “We have a format for how we hold AA meetings,” she says, “and we’re sticking to that format online.” The chairperson kicks things off, there’s a preamble, and the opportunity for group discussion. What’s missing is the hugging, the hand-shaking, and the experience of simply being together. The fundamental, if uneasy, transformation that NYIG is going through to keep resources available to its members is taking place in addiction support groups across the country. Maryland’s Ashley Treatment, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center with three locations across the state,…
Really? – March 24, 2020 – How James is Keeping Busy During Coronavirus Quarantine. Everyone on the VPR cast is handling the coronavirus quarantine differently. Some VPR stars are playing virtual drinking games. Others are dyeing their hair red. James is finding musical inspiration in the crisis. The SUR employee dropped a new track for his followers on Instagram called Coronavirus. His fans left a lot of fire emoji responses in the comment section. @TVShowsAce
Turn It Up to 11 – March 27, 2020 – The Official Charts Company used Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and other services to track the fastest-growing catalogue songs this week. You’ll Never Walk Alone originally featured in the 1945 stage musical Carousel, before Gerry and the Pacemakers’ Merseybeat cover version topped the UK chart in 1963. 1. You’ll Never Walk Alone – Gerry and the Pacemakers2. Locked Up – Akon3. Don’t Stand So Close To Me – The Police4. Lost – Frank Ocean5. Lonely – Akon6. Move Your Feet – Junior Senior7. Imagine – John Lennon8. It’s the End of…
Wish this was this morning? March, 30, 2020 – @YouTube
Everybody’s Human – March 24, 2020 – As an adult, the journalist maintained the belief that she needed to hide her anxiety and began using alcohol to fight the feelings of panic. “It was like, ‘I finally feel relaxed,’” Vargas told ABC News. “All my insecurities would sort of fade back.” Her drinking began affecting her marriage to singer Marc Cohn. “He thought I drank too much,” she said. “I remember he was angry when he said it, and grabbing my arm and saying, ‘You have a problem with alcohol,’ and that just made me really mad.” Vargas’ need…
Stick with the Winners! – March 24, 2020 – Sober since 2001, Rob Lohman currently helps people suffering from substance abuse to find freedom from addiction and incarceration. He does this through sharing his testimony, Professional Interventions and Recovery Coaching, Advocacy, Self-Published Author and being the host of Beyond The Bars Radio Podcast. In year eleven (11) of his sobriety journey, Rob had an emotional nervous breakdown which lead to a thirteen (13) year prison sentence, to which he was released in 10.5 months to a halfway house where he started to rebuild his life, along with his two children…
Flexibility Matters – March 23, 2020 – “We do still do in-person evaluations for people needing immersion services, and we do still have our partial hospitalization program running as well,” explained Dreisbach. “We have segregated neighborhoods, and all these neighborhoods we’re allowed to have about, you know, 20 people on the floor, and they had their own nursing staff, different meal times,” explained Emily Geyer with Recovery Centers of America. Recovery Centers of America is also open. Treatment advocates like Michael Bernardo and Geyer are transporting patients all across Pennsylvania to their facility near Philadelphia, which offers medically monitored detox,…
Alone at last – March 24, 2020 – An ex-addict with a dream His dream has a name: Marvin’s Corner, to honor a wealthy New Yorker who befriended Schmidt, 64, when he was a young man adrift on drugs. He envisions a center like the nonprofit Delancey Street Foundation in San Francisco, where Schmidt got clean more than 30 years ago. South Florida’s need for a similar treatment center has never been greater, experts say. “The [opioid] epidemic continues, but has stabilized and stopped escalating, though consequences such as death are still at the highest levels,” said James N.…
Not-quite-Social Services – March 25, 2020 – “We hear a lot of people saying I feel very alone, I’m very anxious and scared. We’re getting a lot more calls about suicide and suicidal thinking,” Christina Bradley, manager of support programs at the National Alliance on Mental Illness of New York City (NAMI-NYC), told BuzzFeed News. “History shows us that in times of crisis,” we see more mental health-related problems, she said. She said she was very worried about an increase in the number of people killing themselves. Portland Police said on Tuesday that they were seeing a huge spike in…
Think Healthy – March 25, 2020 – Plus, Jude explains, being isolated without our usual social interactions and routines can increase this need to take control in unhealthy ways. Eating disorder habits provide short-term control, although the longer-term impact is that the eating disorder ends up being the one in control. So, if you’re suffering from an eating disorder and finding it being triggered under the current circumstances, what can you do? Jude gives us her top tips: Stay Present: Uncertainty is difficult for all human beings, but it can be more bearable if you choose to accept it…
Gathering No Moss, or Virus – March 28, 2020 – “Or if they’re worried about ‘What do I do next?’, there’s always people out there that can help,” he continued. “If I can do it, you can. I’ve been there and back and I’ve been through the mill and I have quite a colourful history with alcohol and drug abuse in the past. “I use my artillery of things that I’ve learned and my recovery and the 12 Steps. Anyone who thinks they can drink their way through this or something [it’s] not really the way. And, if they need…
Six a day? – 2020 – Addiction is a mental and physiological disorder characterized by the continued use of a substance even though it affects you negatively. People can become addicted to a variety of substances and behaviors, including drugs, prescription medications, sex, and smartphone usage. However, soda addiction doesn’t have an official definition, and there’s currently not enough evidence to suggest that it’s a true disorder. For the purposes of this article, soda addiction, or dependence on soda, can be defined as drinking excessive amounts of soda without being able to quit or moderate your intake — even…
What is the Band-Aid for an overdose – March 26, 2020 – As far back as 2011, advocates and victims were calling on the Drug Enforcement Administration to lower the quota of drugs that may be produced in the United States by Noramco and other narcotics suppliers. By that time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, enough prescription painkillers were being prescribed annually “to medicate every American adult around-the-clock for a month.” Many of the resulting pills were being used for illicit purposes. Yet between 1994 and 2015, the amount of oxycodone the DEA allowed to…
Some priorities don’t wear off – March 17, 2020 – And then the Zoom meeting request came from my boss. For those who don’t know, Zoom is essentially a group FaceTime, albeit a little more corporate and complicated to set up. The concept of marinating in my T-shirts and creating a dent in my bed could no longer exist if I were to talk face-to-face with my superior. I couldn’t allow my boss to see me in my true, disheveled Castaway form, the freedom of loneliness slowly wearing away at my wardrobe and my mind. I knew the dress code…
Tearjerker – March 26, 2020 – Paulette, who’s 47, appeared on Channel 5’s 10 Years Younger in 10 Days, saying it was finally time “to match on the outside what I feel on the inside.” Chatting with presenter Cherry Healy, she said: “I had everything that I could have wanted and I still became an alcoholic. “My self esteem took a massive blow, I feel old, I look tired all the time. It’s definitely aged me.” The turning point for Paulette was when her…
Mirror, Mirror… – March 25, 2020 – As the coronavirus pandemic shut down cities and cloistered people indoors around the world, images began to circulate online of what appeared to be nature retaking territory it had previously ceded to humans. In Japan, deer wandered into transit stations looking for food. In Venice, another post claimed, swans alighted on the normally traffic-clogged canals, the waters of which were clear enough to spy fish below the surface. Some of the photos were hoaxes—the deer were real; the clear canal waters, less so. Nonetheless, people seemed fascinated with the idea that the…
A Must Read! – March 25, 2020 – We have experienced helplessness, before, it is a natural reaction to feeling overwhelmed, it’s part of the collapse that can accompany trauma. But there is a profound, psychological shift that can bring us out of a state of helplessness and hopelessness towards surrender. This is an important shift in trauma parlance. By admitting our powerlessness, we surrender and make a conscious shift from helplessness to powerlessness. By surrendering we’re shifting from a sense of feeling like a helplessness victim, to a chosen recognition of our own powerlessness over, in this case, a…
Another Meth to Clean Up – March 28, 2020 – Opioids, heroin and fentanyl remain abundant, cheap and deadly in this part of Kentucky. In 2017, the rate of fatal opioid overdoses in the state was nearly twice the national average. But the sudden abundance of methamphetamine reflects a new reality in Louisa and elsewhere: A very public push to end opioid abuse has unwittingly ushered in the return of crystal meth. In Concord, N.H., which was ravaged by opioids, the police say methamphetamine now accounts for 60 percent of all drug seizures. In Texas, Hawaii, Oklahoma and Colorado, overdoses…
“Success is a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don’t quit when you’re tired. You quit when the gorilla is tired.” ―Robert Strauss
No Legs and Still Standing Tall – March 21, 2020 – I first caught up with Tomy Parker shortly after he was wounded in Afghanistan. He joined us recently on our statewide radio show – Montana Talks – to talk about how he not only overcame his drug addiction, but how he is fighting back even harder- competing in marathons and more … If you want to follow Tomy’s training, check out the “Adventures with King Kong” Facebook page. The latest post notes that Tomy was set to compete in the revered Bataan Memorial Death March, but that event…
Even More At-Risk – March 21, 2020 – A Florida social worker wrote of her panic for her developmentally disabled clients, who are shut in their homes, unable to even use the bathroom without help. What will happen to them if she and her colleagues fall ill? “We’re going to be seeing some deaths in our caseloads,” she said in an interview. “We might not even know about it until they’ve been dead for several days.” A child protective services worker in the Northeast sent a terrifying list of what kept her up at night: “That my families will…
Renaissance Women – MARCH 20, 2020 – “Delete Forever,” a standout track from the album, sounds simple at first. But, as Grimes describes in the latest episode of Diary of a Song, the track is one of the most vulnerable in her catalog. She started writing it in the fall of 2017, following the death of the emo rapper Lil Peep from an opioid overdose; when Boucher was a teenager, her close friend died in similar circumstances. “How do we emotionally deal with this stuff?” the singer asked, describing the inspiration she took from Jack Kirby’s New Gods comics,…
What Isn’t? – March 19, 2020 – In other words, heating up vitamin E acetate, on its own or in a mixture, provably produces a number of toxic and carcinogenic compounds. Other studies would have to establish the potential pathology of those compounds interacting with the lungs, bloodstream, etc., but it’s safe to say that this substance is an extremely dangerous one to be burning and inhaling. The obvious question of why it was put into cartridges in the first place is answered by the fact that vaping is a much lower-cost alternative to cigarettes and many forms of cannabis……
Is this what they call ‘Gossip’? – March 17, 2020 – During an in-depth interview with The New Yorker, the singer/songwriter said she was put off by the drug after listening to her then-boyfriend Paul Thomas Anderson and the “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” director “brag” throughout the evening while hanging out at Tarantino’s house. “Every addict should just get locked in a private movie theater with Q.T. and P.T.A. on coke, and they’ll never want to do it again,” the 42-year-old quipped. @TooFab
No, drinking is worse – March 20, 2020 – “I had seven years of sobriety, stayed sober through college, and then I relapsed during Hurricane Sandy,” she told the Daily News Thursday. Reed, 32, was living in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, at the time. Her meetings weren’t canceled, but the “heightened anxiety” caused her to stop attending and cut contact with her sponsor. “I felt isolated, scared, and unable to reach out for the help I needed — even though it was very readily available to me. So one day, with seven years of sobriety under my belt, I walked straight into…
Does Not Include Money – 2020 – Determining what the most addictive substance known to man is can be done if we decide on the parameters first. There are three main categories where we can sort the substances: First, we look at the intensity of pleasure that people get from drug use. Although this may sound like a category that will fall down to subjective descriptions, the similarities between people who get addicted tell us a different story. Secondly, we determine the level of physical dependence the substance causes. The final category is the one who focuses on psychological dependence. …
Good News From Pennsylvania – March 20, 2020 – “Providers may use flex beds to remove barriers to treatment and assist facilities in their efforts to effectively utilize resources to meet the needs of individuals entering residential treatment,” said DDAP Secretary Jennifer Smith. Using this flex bed approach allows a facility already licensed to provide both residential detoxification and residential rehabilitation at the same location to utilize empty beds in one activity to conduct services provided in the other activity. For personnel purposes, facilities approved for flex bed may also utilize counselors as primary care staff within their detox unit…
Once We Were Giants – March 21, 2020 – “I’m close to the Ben Cousins story and have been for a long time now. I didn’t think anything he could say would surprise me, but even I was shocked,” Channel 7 reporter Basil Zempilas said. “It’s explosive, compelling and emotional.” Cousins, 41, was rated in journalist Mike Sheahan’s top 50 footballers of all time, but has famously struggled with life post retirement. @FoxSports
Take Home Methadone – March 20, 2020 – “SAMHSA has revised the regulations to allow states to give folks take home medication, so people who meet the criteria are getting take home medication for their treatment,” said Coderre. “Those who still need to come in to the centers are able to do so,” he added. Coderre is encouraging physical, not social, isolation. Stay in touch, he said, and get involved in virtual support groups. “I think the on-line communities are so accepting of all pathways to recovery. Some people choose the twelve steps, some people are on a spiritual path…