The Recovery Project
April 22nd, 2009
More than 22 million Americans struggle with addiction¹. Millions more - family members, friends and colleagues - are touched by the disease.
The Recovery Project was created to break the stigma of addiction, raise national awareness that addiction is a treatable disease and prove that recovery is possible.
We celebrate people in recovery and pay tribute to those who support them: treatment providers, scientists, family and friends. We’re building a nationwide grassroots movement to ensure everyone knows that recovery is possible.
Why 12 step doesn’t work?
July 1st, 2008
I was looking at addiction blog sites and ran across a banner ad that read “Why 12 step doesn’t work”. I was quite engrossed as to my knowledge millions of people have gotte clean and sober through AA and NA so I click on the link and was directed to Clearhaven Treatment Center in Canada.
Their assertion was that the cognitive/behavioral program that they used was far superior to to a 12 step approach and made a lot of assertions about 12 step (”Labels you an addict for life, beaten by addictions, no self control, needing lifetime membership “, “Christian approach dominant”
and “Lifetime attendance required”) that really weren’t true.
As someone who got clean and sober through a cognitive treatment approach and uses that modality with my own clients, I do understand the value of it. But to try to drum up business by turning people against a program that has been so much help to so many is appalling to me.
I am curious if there are other treatment providers out there that feel it is necessary to denegrate one type of treatment to advance their own view of what modality works best.
Posted in General, Opinion | No Comments »
States Must Take the Lead
June 30th, 2008
State policies have a significant impact on the services performed by substance abuse treatment programs, and could play a key role in efforts to expand the use of research-based “comprehensive” treatment approaches, reports a study in the June issue of the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment (JSAT).
“The states are uniquely positioned to institute specific policy proscriptions emanating from scientific research in the substance abuse treatment arena, indicating that a comprehensive approach…[is] associated with positive treatment outcomes and reduced recidivism,” according to the researchers, led by Jamie F. Chriqui, Ph.D., M.H.S., of University of Illinois at Chicago.
Mental Health Patients Must Wait
June 30th, 2008
Nearly 80% of hospitals say mentally ill patients who need to be hospitalized sometimes must wait four hours or longer to be admitted because of a shortage of psychiatric beds and mental health staff, according to a survey by the American College of Emergency Physicians, USA Today reports. By comparison, 30% of hospitals said patients not seeking mental health services had to wait four hours or more before being admitted.
For the study, ACEP officials surveyed 328 emergency medical directors. The survey also found:
About 10% of the directors said psychiatric patients wait more than one day on average;
84% of directors said ED wait times would decrease for all patients if their hospitals offered better psychiatric services;
Half of the hospitals surveyed had psychiatric units, while the rest transferred patients to other facilities; and
61% of hospitals surveyed do not have psychiatric staff caring for ED patients while they wait, but those patients do receive care for other medical problems.
The number of psychiatric beds in U.S. community hospitals has declined 12% since 2000, compared to a 4% decline in overall hospital beds, according to ACEP.
According to James Bentley of the American Hospital Association, hospitals have begun closing their psychiatric units because of low payments from government programs and health insurers, uncompensated care for uninsured patients and a shortage of psychiatrists willing to work in hospitals. Bruce Schwartz, director of psychiatry at Montefiore Medical Center, said, “For individuals in need of admission because they’re psychotic or severely depressed, it can be a very uncomfortable, scary, disorienting time” (Appleby, USA Today, 6/17).
Smoking May Interfere with Recovery from Addiction
July 10th, 2007
Science Daily — Alcoholics frequently smoke. Anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of individuals in North America who seek alcoholism treatment are also chronic smokers. New findings indicate that smoking may interfere with alcoholics’ neurocognitive recovery during their first six to nine months of abstinence from alcohol.
“There are several possible explanations for the concurrent use of alcohol and tobacco products,” said Timothy C. Durazzo, assistant adjunct professor in the department of radiology at the University of California San Francisco, and corresponding author for the study. “Nicotine and alcohol may enhance each other’s rewarding properties; nicotine may decrease some of alcohol’s negative effects on cognition and motor incoordination; paired use of nicotine and alcohol may produce a strong association between the two substances such that the use of one leads to cravings for the other; and there may exist a genetic vulnerability for concurrent active cigarette smoking and alcohol dependence.”