Whenever I am asked what it is I believe helped me the most in my healing journey, I reply that it is the fact that I listened to my own inner guidance over and above any expert’s opinion. Sometimes my gut instincts told me to do something completely irrational and illogical, and I did it…
By my mid twenties I had recognized the pattern: every time I resurfaced from a depression it was accompanied by the same emotion: anger. I realized that if depression could be characterized as repressed anger, which is a form of powerlessness, then it only made sense that getting in touch with my fundamental power would…
Six years after I resurfaced from my journey through addiction and depression, my sister sent me a revolutionary work by Dr. Gabor Mate. His book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, validates from a medical perspective what I lived through experientially. Dr. Mate is one of those rare breeds of people who go where the…
A few days ago I received an envelope of letters from a group of young people in recovery I’d taken out and introduced to the sport that literally saved my life. It’s always been my intention to share my love of ice so that it may help others. I think I might be on track……
I don’t have heroes; most of the people put up before us for admiration simply don’t impress me. They may be rich, beautiful, or exhibit a superb level of athletic prowess. But they cannot command my attention for possessing such superfluous traits. And so it came as a surprise to me yesterday when I met…
Like most great street sayings, this one originated in the African American neighborhoods in the late seventies and early eighties, in conjunction with the crack epidemic that swept their demographic. Nothing will ruin a neighborhood, or an individual life, faster than a cheap, hard drug. And nobody uses these drugs more than the marginalized segments…
“If you are dependent on something outside yourself to feel good, you are addicted.” When I was offered the choice of trading in my cocaine habit for a lithium habit, I knew the only difference was a legal one. I knew in my bones that I needed to face the uncomfortable feelings I had been…
People often ask me why I can have a glass of red wine with dinner if I am a recovered addict. I tell them that substances are not the problem; the psychological state underlying the abuse is. Once I dealt with the underlying issues, and healed from them, the substances became irrelevant. Like most things…
A recent Harvard study dovetails nicely into what Dr Gabor Mate has been asserting for years. In the words of the researchers themselves, “childhood abuse leads to permanent changes in a seahorse-shaped area of the brain that can cause adult depression and drug abuse.” It also dovetails nicely into a recent surge of anecdotal evidence,…
In one hundred years, will the treatment of mental illness with a vast array of psychotropic drugs be seen as a success story, or a vast human tragedy? When I was diagnosed with Bi Polar Disorder in my early twenties, I spent less than thirty minutes in the psychiatrist’s office where I was given a…