Many veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) live with profound doubts about the meaning of a life perceived as dominated by suffering, guilt, and death. This loss of meaning and purpose has a noticeable impact on their psychological well-being.
Recovery is a life-long journey. The Farley Center team believes that treatment is just the beginning of that journey. At Farley, aftercare is a crucial element of addiction treatment. Our aftercare planning starts the day the patient is admitted to the residential program.
Families are strongly affected by the disease of the person with the addiction. That means families and their addicted loved one need to recover in parallel. This process requires skills and understanding.
Addiction is a family disease and it typically prompts families to make slow, incremental, adaptive changes over time in response to the steady progression of the disease. Unfortunately, those changes often exacerbate the problem.
The American Society of Addiction Medicine defines addiction as “a treatable, chronic medical disease involving complex interactions among brain circuits, genetics, the environment, and an individual's life experiences. People with addiction use substances or engage in behaviors that become compulsive and often continue despite harmful consequences.”
People with addiction as well as their friends and families often struggle with determining whether addiction is a personal choice or a complex brain disease.
For addiction expert Kevin McCauley, M.D.—himself in recovery from opioid use disorder—that is the most fundamental question about addiction: is it really is a disease? As he explains he himself was skeptical at first when people told him addiction was a disease. Don’t addicted people make the deliberate choice to harm themselves?
Gratitude is not just saying “thank you.” New research indicates that gratitude can literally change your brain. Psychologically speaking, it has the amazing ability to shift our thinking from focusing on the negative to appreciating all the positive things that surround us.
Isolation and uncertainty amid the COVID-19 pandemic compounded by reduced access to treatment have led to a rise in suspected overdoses and an increase in substance use nationwide. More than 13 percent of Americans have started or increased substance use, including legal or illegal drugs, alcohol, and prescription drugs, to “cope with stress or emotions related to COVID-19,” according to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
For many years now, traditional 12-Step facilitation (TSF) as promoted by Alcoholics Anonymous has been branded by some healthcare professionals as too old-fashioned, too unscientific, and too moralistic. Gabrielle Glaser summed it up in The Atlantic in 2015:
When addiction treatment professionals ask their clients what drug they are using, they often get more than one answer. A significant number of people with addiction misuse more than one substance. They may take different drugs on separate occasions or combine them for a stronger high or a specific effect. Polydrug use poses a higher risk than use of a single illicit drug alone, due to an increase in side effects, and drug synergy.