Often it is difficult for parents to recognize when their child is abusing alcohol, using illegal drugs, or in trouble with other substances that are hazardous to their health, safety, and wellbeing. Clearing the Haze is a guide designed to help parents determine whether their child may have a substance problem and, if so, how to begin to address it. The book includes the voices and insight of experts in substance abuse counseling, young people in recovery, and parents who have lived the nightmare of adolescent addiction. The book moves readers through an overview of adolescent brain development, the warning signs of drug use and addiction, treatment options, what families should expect of therapy, the basics of productive communication, and the difficulties of dealing lovingly with addicted teens. The authors encourage families entering the 12th step of “giving back” to consider advocacy for smarter public policies surrounding drug access and addiction treatment. They also provide a list of resources parents may find useful. A necessary resource for every community, this book will help parents, teachers, friends, and others help kids who need help.

You've heard the horror stories about drug addiction. Your eyes glaze over with half-hearted interest when you see the stats surrounding the "opioid crisis." You know you should care that 130 people are dying of accidental overdose every day in America, yet you just can't seem to muster the compassion. Substance use disorder may be a vague abstraction to most of us, but our friends and family are not. Our sons and daughters aren't "junkies" who deserve to be written off by society. They are human beings whose lives are filled with meaning and potential. Joshua Lawson has worked as an organizer, pastor, and ally to people who use drugs in central Appalachia for the past three years. The Face of Addiction tells the stories of twelve people he met when he first began "getting close" to the things that matter in his community. There's the woman whose husband succumbed to an overdose even though she was sure he'd finally beaten it. The man who found a reason for recovery in his daughter's letter to Santa. The city councilman whose perspective finally changed after years of family turmoil. What's more, two of the people featured here have died since giving their interview. That's how important it is for you to hear what they have to say. So much heartache and loss. So much joy and redemption. So much humanity. This is the face of addiction.

"Mom, nobody wakes up one day and decides to be an addict." The stories contained in this book are about people from every walk of life, socioeconomic levels, religious and ethnic backgrounds whose lives were intertwined with people who didnt "decide to be an addict." They all share one common bond - living with, and loving an addicted person. Contained within the pages of this book are stories by bereaved parents who have suffered the ultimate loss: The loss of their precious child. Read how addiction, whether it be drugs, alcohol or gambling, destroys not only the addicted person, but their entire circle of friends and family. No one escapes the tentacles of addiction. Like an octopus it reaches its deadly arms around us and squeezes the very life out of all of us. Our society is affected in ways we never imagined. Read excerpts from middle school students on the peer pressures they face today. Read about "pharming" and other code words used by kids. Read the stories of parents who have gone through hell, sacrificing their very sanity trying to save their child. The profiles of these children will change your mind about what kind of people do drugs. GOOD KIDS DO DRUGS TOO! And theyre dying by the thousands from high profile celebrities to the boys and girls next door. It isnt always heroin or cocaine thats killing them. Prescription pill abuse is growing at an alarming rate and parents need to know about this.

The most innovative leaders in progressive addiction treatment in the US offer a groundbreaking, science-based guide to helping loved ones overcome addiction problems and compulsive behaviors. The most innovative leaders in progressive addiction treatment in the US offer a groundbreaking, science-based guide to helping loved ones overcome addiction problems and compulsive behaviors. Beyond Addiction eschews the theatrics of interventions and tough love to show family and friends how they can use kindness, positive reinforcement, and motivational and behavioral strategies to help their loved ones change. Drawing on forty collective years of research and decades of clinical experience, the authors present the best practical advice science has to offer. Delivered with warmth, optimism, and humor, Beyond Addiction defines a new, empowered role for friends and family and a paradigm shift for the field. Learn how to tap the transformative power of relationships for positive change, guided by exercises and examples. Practice what really works in therapy and in everyday life, and discover many different treatment options along with tips for navigating the system. And have hope: this guide is designed not only to help someone change, but to help someone want to change.

"The East Side of Addiction is an altogether real and gritty depiction of a middle class neighborhood's descent into addiction and the collateral damage suffered by their families and the community at large. The book narrates an "Against All Odds" themed story, written to give hope to a generation devastated by the current Opiold Epidemic."

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and The Boston Globe An authoritative, illuminating, and deeply humane history of addiction—a phenomenon that remains baffling and deeply misunderstood despite having touched countless lives—by an addiction psychiatrist striving to understand his own family and himself “Carl Erik Fisher’s The Urge is the best-written and most incisive book I’ve read on the history of addiction. In the midst of an overdose crisis that grows worse by the hour and has vexed America for centuries, Fisher has given us the best prescription of all: understanding. He seamlessly blends a gripping historical narrative with memoir that doesn’t self-aggrandize; the result is a full-throated argument against blaming people with substance use disorder. The Urge is a propulsive tour de force that is as healing as it is enjoyable to read.” —Beth Macy, author of Dopesick Even after a decades-long opioid overdose crisis, intense controversy still rages over the fundamental nature of addiction and the best way to treat it. With uncommon empathy and erudition, Carl Erik Fisher draws on his own experience as a clinician, researcher, and alcoholic in recovery as he traces the history of a phenomenon that, centuries on, we hardly appear closer to understanding—let alone addressing effectively. As a psychiatrist-in-training fresh from medical school, Fisher was soon face-to-face with his own addiction crisis, one that nearly cost him everything. Desperate to make sense of the condition that had plagued his family for generations, he turned to the history of addiction, learning that the current quagmire is only the latest iteration of a centuries-old story: humans have struggled to define, treat, and control addictive behavior for most of recorded history, including well before the advent of modern science and medicine. A rich, sweeping account that probes not only medicine and science but also literature, religion, philosophy, and public policy, The Urge illuminates the extent to which the story of addiction has persistently reflected broader questions of what it means to be human and care for one another. Fisher introduces us to the people who have endeavored to address this complex condition through the ages: physicians and politicians, activists and artists, researchers and writers, and of course the legions of people who have struggled with their own addictions. He also examines the treatments and strategies that have produced hope and relief for many people with addiction, himself included. Only by reckoning with our history of addiction, he argues—our successes and our failures—can we light the way forward for those whose lives remain threatened by its hold. The Urge is at once an eye-opening history of ideas, a riveting personal story of addiction and recovery, and a clinician’s urgent call for a more expansive, nuanced, and compassionate view of one of society’s most intractable challenges.