Addiction

Though alcohol consumption is considered more socially acceptable than the use of narcotics like cocaine or heroin, drinking is far from harmless. Alcohol can pose detrimental health and safety risks. According to the CDC, excessive drinking is the cause for more than 140,000 deaths each year in the United States. ...

Theia came out as a member of the LGBTQ+ community on Christmas Day 2020. The lifelong struggle to accept and reveal her true gender identity went hand-in-hand with a dependency on drugs and alcohol that resulted in her first stint in rehab by the age of 16. Having battled substance ...

Across the nation, April is Alcohol Awareness Month, and a recent study drives home the importance of raising awareness of the tolls of alcohol and substance misuse now more than ever. A Tragic Increase New research from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, published in the Journal of ...

According to the CDC, the first-known wave of opioid overdoses began with the rise of opioid prescriptions in the 1990s. At the time, many pharmaceutical companies and prescribers did not have enough research about the potency and addictive nature of these medications. As methadone and semi-synthetic opioid usage began to ...

The impact of addiction spreads far beyond the person struggling with it. Too often, those closest to the person suffering are also going through their own struggle as a result, which is why we call addiction a family disease. If you have a loved one currently in early recovery or ...

Opioid use is uncommonly high in the construction industry, where workers face many physical hazards and are at an increased risk of getting injured. One study shows that construction workers are the most likely occupation to misuse opioids and cocaine. Compared to other industries in North America, construction workers are ...

Words matter, especially when we as a society continue to fight the stigma against those struggling with addiction. As we learn more every day about drug and alcohol addiction disorders, we also have to contend with the fact that helpful and educational terms change over time. Sometimes it can be ...

Recently, actor Dax Shepard shared a big secret with the world: he had relapsed after sixteen years of sobriety. On his podcast, Armchair Expert, he explained that he had been keeping an “enormous secret,” that he had been prescribed painkillers after a motorcycle accident and ultimately started misusing them. What ...

We’ve been talking a lot about the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic: the frustration of not being able to go out, the difficulty in trying to get certain items, and the simple boredom of being trapped inside day after day. But what we haven’t talked about is the fear and ...

They see them every day in homes and in neighborhoods – overdoses. Day after day, they respond to calls and provide critical emergency services to people suffering overdoses or associated illness, transporting patients to hospitals and even providing help for people who ask for it. The Westborough Fire Department is ...

How it Affects Children and What Can Be Done to Help. Anyone who has a family member suffering from addiction knows how painful it is to watch someone you love struggle with an all-consuming life-threatening disease. Challenges that come with living with someone that has a drug or alcohol addiction ...

Language nuances change over time as society gains greater awareness and sensitivity regarding the struggles experienced by various groups of people. In the addiction treatment community, we’re well aware of the stigma often associated with the disease and its related vocabulary. The concepts of alcohol and drug dependency weren’t considered ...