by Tom Horvath, Ph.D., ABPP. Clients often attempt to choose addiction treatment carefully. Typically, they search for a “program” suitable to their problems, at least as they understand their problems. Unfortunately, most clients are uneducated about addiction. They are not professionals, and the addiction treatment industry and media often present inaccurate information. Consequently, clients can end up in facilities that harm them rather than help them, primarily because in these facilities substandard practices are common (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Surgeon General, 2016). Almost daily in our offices at Practical Recovery we hear about what goes wrong in addiction treatment. Here are some examples. Treatment sessions are not conducted by psychoth...

by Thaddeus Camlin, Psy.D. Outpatient Rehab: What the Experts Say Anyone who encounters the US addiction treatment industry is likely to experience a ‘hard sell’ on inpatient.  The idea that addiction problems are resolved by ‘going away for 30 days’ is as pervasive as it is uninformed.  Lasting change may be initiated in four weeks, but it takes much longer to become engrained.  While the cultural mythos of addiction treatment continues to promote the notion that most people need to go away for 30 days, experts have been saying that outpatient rehab is actually the best fit for most people for quite some time. William Miller and Reid Hester (two leading experts in the field of addiction treatment) looked at who benefits from inpatient alcohol treatment and found no overall advanta...

Thinking about quitting drinking? Here's some advice you might not want to follow. There is an abundance of advice about quitting drinking out there that conspicuously lacks the hallmarks of thought and wisdom.  Advice itself can often be a sign of unsophisticated “help.”  While there are likely many more witless ideas about quitting drinking than this article covers, we’ve hand-selected a few of our favorite Mickey Mouse methods for your enjoyment. 1. Don't Substitute. Tell people who had a failing liver and used cannabis as a substitution for alcohol that substitution doesn’t work. 2. You have to announce your problem to the world. It might not be the best idea to pull your boss or your father-in-law-to-be aside to let them know that you’ve been drinking more than you want to. ...

Drug Rehab: Predicting the Future by Thaddeus Camlin, Psy.D. I’m told people want to know what drug rehab will be like in 100 years.  So, this week let’s put on our Doc Brown suit, make sure Einstein has a doggy sitter, secure dangerous amounts of plutonium, and fire up our flux capacitor so we can send our favorite McFly back to the future of rehab. As we travel into the hypothetical it would be folly to ignore the major mistakes that other artists seem to inevitably make when they conduct their best Nostradamus impersonations.  In the 1980’s a handful of popular films depicted what our present day would be like (e.g. Back to the Future, Terminator, Blade Runner).  The films from the 1980’s that predicted the future that is today all grossly overshot the technological advances o...

by Thaddeus Camlin, Psy.D. Adderall vs. Meth When it comes to amphetamines, our culture seems to want to eat our drugs and have them too.  On one hand, Adderall is marketed with promises of saving marriages or images of smiling children with taglines like, “Finally, schoolwork that matches his intelligence.”  On the other hand, we’re inundated with images of  “meth mouth” and propaganda campaigns with wholesome slogans like, “15 bucks for sex isn’t normal, but on meth it is,” and, “Before meth I had a daughter, now I have a prostitute.”  Well, if tooth decay, cost-effective intimate companionship, and disowning children are normal for meth, we must ask ourselves why meth is still a prescribed medication for ADHD and weight loss. Yes, you read correctly, today, right now, in 2018, y...

If you have ever experienced drug and alcohol addiction, whether it was your own substance use or a loved one's, you were likely on the receiving end of opinions from others. US culture and its collective views on addiction are often rooted in shame, degradation, and negativity. More importantly, however, the mainstream conversation is all too often shrouded in myths and misinformation. These myths of drug and alcohol addiction are not only untrue,  they are dangerous for those who are in need of treatment and unsupportive for those in recovery. The misinformation paints a scary uphill battle for those who enter recovery, when, really, recovery is a journey of healing, hope, and self-empowerment. We've collected 12 of the most common myths of drug and alcohol addiction in an attempt ...

by Tom Horvath, Ph.D., ABPP Benefits of Software in Addiction Treatment For about a year Practical Recovery has included the Checkup & Choices website (www.checkupandchoices.com) in our work. By referring clients to the site we reduce the amount of time they spend with clinicians, thereby lowering their fees.  We also increase the accuracy of both assessment and psycho-education. Psycho-education is that part of psychotherapy in which the clinician delivers basic information about a common topic (e.g., how to cope with craving). Software does not have memory lapses. Unlike the more variable clinician, software asks the same questions and delivers the same information each time (barring the occasional hardware or software problems). Of course, to eliminate memory problems du...

As one of the first rehabs that began offering non 12 step treatment, we’ve been around long enough to hear just about every misperception out there regarding this non-traditional approach to treatment. If you’ve been searching for addiction treatment, or have gone to a non 12 step rehab program, you’ve likely come across some of these misunderstandings yourself. Below, we give you the top 14 misperceptions about non 12 step rehab and, hopefully, set the record straight. 1. Non 12 step rehabs are anti-AA/NA. Not true!  Non 12 step is in favor of options, and powerlessness based approaches are an important and helpful option for some. 2. Non 12 step rehabs tell “alcoholics” to drink. Nonsense!  Self-empowering approaches, as a general rule, don’t tell anyone what to do. 3. Non 12 st...

by Thaddeus Camlin, Psy.D. This week we look at how to be unpopular in the addiction treatment industry - a topic we at Practical Recovery are certainly experts in! 1. Treat Addiction in Stages, Not Steps To be unpopular in the addiction treatment industry, the first step is to treat addiction in stages, not steps.  Framing addiction within the stages of change (precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance) helps treatment providers match interventions to each individual’s level of motivation.  With the stages of change as a framework for treatment a higher power, character defects, and spiritual maladies are optional and not emphasized.  While emphasizing self-guided recovery through fluid, often non-linear stages of change creates individualized and flexible ...

by Thaddeus Camlin Psy.D. A recent study analyzed thousands of social media posts and found reliable predictors of depression in the language people use, or what we can call the language of depression.  The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Psychological Science, reveals three ways to predict depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation.  Extrapolating from the results offers some intriguing considerations that relate to how we think, the way in which our thinking influences our mood and behavior, and how our language might influence addictive cycles. You might also be interested in: The Antidote to Depression Post Content as a Predictor of Depression and Anxiety The first two predictors of depression and anxiety in social media that researchers found were in the content o...