Name: The truth about addiction and recovery
ISBN: 9780671755300

What Hacker News says

DoreenMicheleFeb 2022

I will recommend the book The truth about addiction and recovery if you want to better understand what happened. It suggests that giving people meaningful work and a means to succeed is a viable means of treatment for addiction.

I will note that I know a fair amount about homelessness and I think the angle that "homeless people are all junkies and crazies" is way over hyped.

But thank you for doing this for them. You did a good thing.

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MaknMoreGtnLessFeb 2022

> I will recommend the book The truth about addiction and recovery if you want to better understand what happened. It suggests that giving people meaningful work and a means to succeed is a viable means of treatment for addiction.

I really appreciate you sharing this. As you can guess, I stumbled into this.

> I will note that I know a fair amount about homelessness and I think the angle that "homeless people are all junkies and crazies" is way over hyped.

Would you be able to share the geographic location for the homeless you studied?

What was the segment and proportion of actual junkies to crazies to on-bad-luck-but-can-be-helped you noticed?

What I have noticed in SF and NYC is a certain number of them are indeed mentally unstable. The reason why I am yet to expand beyond a second person is because I was stabbed by a schizophrenic who was convinced I was the Jonah who had been tormenting him in his sleep for years. The police have asked me to work thorough certain agencies and NGOs since then. Unfortunately it's impossible to make any progress through them as far as having them work on my farm is concerned. They only want donations and cannot work with my farm idea.

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MzNov 2017

My father drank a lot. He quit after he left the army. I think he drank to suppress nightmares and he was able to quit -- without any kind of program, like AA -- once there was no threat of returning to a war zone.

I also have known people who were apparently drinking to treat some undiagnosed medical condition and drank less or quit drinking after the condition was properly treated.

I think it would help to assume you have some reason for drinking so much. Now you need to figure out why that is and try to solve the underlying problem.

I like the book "The truth about addiction and recovery" as a resource.

Best.

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MzAug 2016

My observation has been that drugs don't really fuck up people's lives. People with fucked up lives turn to drugs and then, when they are ready to get their act together, they also get off the drugs. Then blame the problems on the drug use.

I am pretty much a tea-totaller. I am also allergic to marijuana, so I have no desire to be around it. But I have known people in person and read articles and the like. One example that comes to mind: 16 year old boy's brother is gruesomely murdered, he becomes an addict or alcoholic and when he is 19 he decides to get clean and sober. So, he's had three years to process his grief and he is now a legal adult, not a helpless legal minor who can't do much about anything wrong in his life. Now, he wants to be sober and talks trash about what a bad person he was for using/drinking and blah blah blah.

My best guess: It is easier and/or more socially acceptable to blame drugs than to admit that life really shat on them, their parents are assholes, whatever. But, in most cases, it looks to me like they use for a reason and if that underlying reason gets better, then they will tend to stop using.

I am fond of the book "The truth about addiction and recovery" which basically takes this view.

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MzJul 2011

The risk-taking, novelty-seeking and obsessive personality traits often found in addicts can be harnessed to make them very effective in the workplace. For many leaders, it’s not the case that they succeed in spite of their addiction; rather, the same brain wiring and chemistry that make them addicts also confer on them behavioral traits that serve them well.

This is ridiculous in some ways. Yes, certain personality traits predispose you to certain things. But environment also plays a role. I imagine most leaders suffer from something I would call "bored gifted kid syndrome". And if they find a means to be adequately engaged, it goes away and stops being a "personality problem".

In fact, framing it as "addictive personality" helps create problems by vilifying them in a way that seems inescapable -- like "you were born defective". My oldest son is profoundly gifted and was prone to "addictive" behaviors (not drugs or alcohol, but video games and such) and when we figured out how to meet his needs for mental stimulation adequately, he went from behaving like your typical grumpy, socially defective addict to being one of the calmest people I know. I never told him he was "defective". I didn't frame it that way. And it helped him find his way out of what often ends up being a psychological trap.

Edit: There is a book that addresses the social aspect of creating addicts by imposing expectations that it is out of their hands -- for example, cultures that blame alcoholism on the alcohol have higher rates of it than cultures that hold the individual responsible. Title: "The Truth About Addiction and Recovery". One wife of an alcoholic who tried to hand me my head for recommending this book then went on to talk about "dry drunks" (people who remain "addicted" to alcohol while not drinking for years at a time) and that the real problem with alcoholism was all the "isms" (by that I think she meant beliefs?) not the alcohol per se. She was on such a tear, I didn't bother to point out that her remarks supported mine rather than refuting them.

EDIT: Since comment scores are not visible, I will note that this is being upvoted, downvoted, upvoted, downvoted. I would be curious as to what is so seemingly controversial. Any thoughts?

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MzAug 2010

There is a book called "The Truth about Addiction and Recovery" that you might find interesting. One of the points it makes is that focusing overly much on the drinking problem tends to make it harder to solve. That resonates with me. My father drank a great deal in his youth, probably to try to drown out memories of his time on the front lines in two wars. He developed a heart problem when I was a little girl, blamed it on the drinking and never drank again. I think part of why that worked is because he was never labeled "an alcoholic" and my mother never made a big issue out of his drinking, in part because he wasn't a mean drunk and there was always enough money.

I think people do things for a reason. I would wonder what the reason was and try to address that in a non-blaming, non-controlling fashion. I think trying to "fix" another human being generally comes across as blaming and controlling and, because of that, tends to be rejected by the intended recipient. You might also consider reading some material by Deepak Chopra concerning the impact of the mind/attitudes/mental framing on health outcomes.

Good luck with this.

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