People don't get it. Addiction is a life long illness

"People always come up to me and say, 'We got heroin problems and all these other problems.' You know what? If you work all day long, you don't have time to do heroin," the Kenutcky senator said to applause while holding a meet-and-greet at the Airport Diner in Manchester.

The Centers for Disease 

Heroin Addiction Has doubled the last 10 years. Ressession influenced maybe?

Can a terrible economy be at the root of these high addiction numbers?                                                 

"Heroin use has more than doubled among people aged 18-25 in the United States in the past decade, according to CDC figures, while overdose death rates have nearly quadrupled. An estimated 45 percent of U.S. heroin users are also addicted to prescription painkillers." 

Certainly. When people have no bright financial future or cannot feed their family properly then the pressure they feel becomes one of failure and misery. Addiction bares fruit when a person is at their most vulnerable. Vulnerable being their mind is under stress and turmoil. When the mind is unquiet addiction takes root. A psychological disorder and stressful environmental pressures create the perfect stew to trigger an addiction. 

Addiction is the mind reacting to noise. The mind wants to end the pressure from all the complications going on inside it. The emotional and stressful feelings cause the mind to find temporary ways to numb the noise. Addiction works and  thats why a person with the right combination of underlying conditions will become addicted if not properly treating for those conditions.

Homelessness A Thing Of The Past. Here's How.

I read an interesting article out this week which supports a major study on Homelessness and how to end it. They conclude  "spending federal money to house the homeless would end it". Sounds impracticable I know but they say that the homeless waste a lot of tax money being on the street committing crimes etc. Sounds logical but people that are homeless are in that situation mostly due to mental illness and not being "socially stable". Some people if you gave them a free home they would invite drug dealing friends and the likes over and even rent out rooms in their house to support their addiction. They may even burn the house down or have troublesome people over that would cause fights and violence. The answer to putting an end to homelessness is to monitor the mental health of the homeless before you "give" them homes. You have to assess their stability and capability to be responsible on their own. You must grade the homeless by their stability level. Are they mentally capable of keeping a home safely? Some of the homeless "residents" can only be in a group home setting with strict rules and no visitors. Some are a danger to others and need daily monitoring, mental health treatment and medication. Their are degrees of homelessness.
Some people fall on hard times and become temporarily homeless and are easier to reintegrate back into society while others may have mental scars from abuse and neglect. There never will be simple answers but if the politicians really cared homelessness can be cut in half at the least but no one elected to office cares to do the heavy lifting necessary to help solve the social ills of today. The population is growing at a huge rate and if the issues of homelessness aren't better resolved now, then when the population has an extra 10 billion people in 50 years the world is in for some very tragic times. That's the reason you see this move toward globalization and a one world government, because our leaders are trying to prepare for a population explosion and at the rate their going everyone is in deep trouble and suffering times. Eliminating homelessness takes commitment, and that's something very few politicians care to do. Most are incompetent to even comprehend the issues.  Bill Wilson, the chief founder of Alcoholics Anonymous has been dead since 1971 but yet the organization he built still goes on to help hundreds of thousands of Alcoholics and drug addicts each year. That's more than tens of thousands of living politicians combined are doing right now.

Here's the link explaining the study to end homelessness.     http://finance.yahoo.com/news/cheapest-way-end-homelessness-ridiculously-191417117.html

In order to quit drinking/drugging its more than just "stop doing it". Its a change of lifestyle.

If you are addicted to drugs or alcohol and you want to stop that lifestyle, you need to change your entire lifestyle and the way you think about your life. There are factors that made you an addict and by eliminating your vice, its not the only thing you need to do to live sober and clean. You became addicted in the first place because of factors beyond your control. You felt overwhelming pressures in your daily environment. Also you were weighed down by hard to control factors associated with or associating with your family. There were financial burdens you may have felt unable to properly control or handle. Your physiological make up caused you to endure an unquiet mind due to anxiety or depression or something of a psychotic nature. The pressures within your family may have added to your anxiety or depression. Whatever the set of circumstances you faced, they were enough to make you uneasy to the point that you became addicted to drugs or drinking as a form of self medicating weather you realized it was occurring to you or not.

Getting clean from addiction means you have to look at the areas of your life you felt bogged down and severely uneasy about. You will need to take inventory of what coping issues you have and know what will bring them more at ease. It is a process of healing, correcting and understanding your life in a new way. Take it one step at a time and see to it you have a good psychiatrist or therapist that you can recount your life with so that there is an objective honest opinion you can get true feedback from. This is where a true change happens in your life.

When these negative and destructive influences are best understood by you, it will be then and only then that you can confront them and eliminate the power they have over drawing you into an addictive pull which leads you to seek self medication in order to tame their unpleasant and unbalanced mental stresses and strains. Addiction is the minds way of finding ease. Draw these influences down and it will be easier for you to abstain from drugs and alcohol.

There is no Cure for alcoholism or drug addiction. Only medical aids to help an addict.

There is a book by Roy Eskapa titled"The Cure for Alcoholism: The medically proven way to eliminate alcohol addiction". There have been advances in medicine to help eliminate cravings and block effects of some addicting drugs including alcohol. But anyone that says they have the "cure" for addiction are way off base. The title of this book is selling instant gratification to sell books. If an addict uses a drug to block the effects of addicting drugs that will deter an addict from using that particular drug, but that does not arrest the underlying factors that come together to give an addict an unquiet mind. The addict also has to cooperate and take the medicine faithfully to block the effects of the drug they are addicted to. I have pointed out all along that mostly physiological factors determine if a person will become an addict and also determine what drug will become addicting to the addict. But the unquiet mind which is the underlying factor of all addiction needs to be treated to suspend the addiction. Thats right. The addiction can only be suspended not cured. All environmental, psychological and physiological factors that make up an addict must be addressed. By using Naltrexone and other drugs to block an addictive drugs effects, the addict will still gravitate to another drug or behavior. If the underlying factors are not addressed then the addict cannot manage a daily sobriety. Any pills that aid in helping an addict get clean are just that, an aid to helping ease the symptoms of withdrawal and the cravings.

 

The major effects aging has on addiction

Aging and addiction are something the addict and the loved one trying to help the addict should learn about. When an addict ages they tend to mellow and not be as severe as they were when they were 20 versus age 40. But as the addict grows older and greyer theyre use of drugs or alcohol will natural go down but the flip side of that coin is that the addict/alcoholic will need less of theyre drug or alcohol to get higher. This is more true with drinking than with hard drugs. Also as the addict continues to use drugs and alcohol into their 40s, and beyond, they tear down the health of their mind and bodys organs. Just the heavy and continued use of drugs and alcohol by the severe addict will on average cut 10 to 20 years off their life. It is very important that the addict/alcoholic quit using drugs and alcohol before middle age because if they dont the future is not a healthy one.

I have not met an addict who was healthy in their forties or fifties. And its very hard to find an active addict or alcohol that makes it into their 60s. If they do they are sick and have not much time to live anymore. When we are young and invincible we discard such thought. After all we never believed we were gonna get old. We thought youth was ours forever. We have to always realize the clock is ticking away. Because if we dont change our destiny and quit drinking and drugging early in life, our destiny will not be a long one.

Treating addiction with no experience

The most troubling thing about wanting to get clean or wanting to help a love one get clean is that you just dont know how to begin. I was 5 years old when I realized my moms alcoholism had caused my dad to divorce her. My mom and dad were separated and divorcing while my brother, sister and I were living with mom in a rented house on the back of a lot at 9919 South Exchange ave in Chicago. As a 5 year old it was traumatizing not knowing how to get my mom to quit drinking. As a young child then I had dreamed up a way to get my mom and dad to reconcile and for my mom to quit drinking, it involved my 6 year old brother and me dressing up as a policeman and telling my mom and dad that they need to remarry. I had figured I can sit on my brothers shoulders so we would look tall enough to be an adult and we could wear a police uniform and order them to get back together. After all everyone knew that you had to listen to the police. Well we never carried out the plan and looking back I can see it would'nt have worked. But in my mind I was suffering because my mom and dad were not together anymore.

So as early as childhood my family suffered because my mother was suffering from alcoholism. Our family, your family and the addict all suffer when a severe addiction to drugs or alcohol strikes one of our loved ones. The dilemma is that addiction is so complex we dont know what to do to stop the addiction. When I quit drinking on April 17th 1993 I wanted to do more than just stay clean and sober. I decided to make it a comittment to find out why alcoholism and drug addiction has such a powerful hold on people. I had to know why drinking alcohol was so powerful of a force that I was compelled to make the decision and take my money and screw up my life and senses by buying hard liquor and drinking it. Why did I make such a choice, a choice that caused me to isolate from friends and family, a choice that caused me many years of homelessness and financial ruin. After all, when I was getting into trouble right before I became clean and sober my brother had counseled me and told me this advice "if I knew alcohol was ruining my life, I just would quit drinking it, just stop" and he surmised to me "why cant you just stop?" Just as with anything in life, if youve never did it before you dont understand it. Its like raising your first child, after youve raised 4 or five you look back on all the mistakes you made raising the first one. The 4th or 5th child are handled better because you finally learned how to stop a kid from crying all night or how to potty train at an earlier age. So when you or loved is suffering from a severe addiction to drugs or alcohol, chances are huge you dont know the first thing to do to stop it.

You see, even my brother as smart as he was couldnt understand alcoholism and addiction. He didnt know how to help an addict sustain from their vice. He didnt understand why an addict "just didnt stop". Thats why I spent 20 years of my life after I got sober, educating myself on the reason alcoholism and drug addiction occurs, and why its forces and compulsions are so strong they cant be broken so easily. I have read over 300 books dealing with alcoholism and drug addiction recovery, addiction counseling, underlying disorders and Ive studied dual diagnosis, which is having an addiction together with a psychological disorder.
Make no mistake, addiction to alcohol and drugs is very complex, but there are underlying principals which when understood make it easy to grasp and better deal with.

In "Treating Addiction", I have taken the complex and spelled it out for you. Youll read a lot about "the unquiet mind" in this book. What the unquiet mind is, is simply a psychological, physiological, environmental (or combination of these factors) which caused the brain to become unbalanced, and with the mind being unbalanced, it is in constant search for finding balance. It is an unsettling uneasy and unquiet feeling that will make it find calm one way or the other. And the cycle of addiction will bring it calm temporarily, but also leave havoc in its wake. The perfect example of this can be seen when a smoker is locked up in a meeting for several hours and is unable to smoke a cigarette. When they finally rush outside after the meeting is over you can see them tremble and fumble with their pack of cigarettes as they pull out a cigarette and light it. Their mind is extremely unquiet and unbalanced until they take that first drag on their cigarette. Now their mind has found quietness with the niccotene hit from their smoke.But this unquietness only lasts about a half minute or so as the niccotene wears low in their brain and another "fix" is needed to bring quick calm again. Once the addict finds a way to bring calm to their mind through other ways other than the repetitive use of alcohol or drugs, then the addict is ready to live a clean productive life free from the ravages of addiction to alcohol and drugs. We call this addiction free life a "daily management" of their underlying condition. Ill provide examples of management and how to monitor your unquiet mind and keep it more balanced so your recovery can begin.

Time and time again I get emails or phone calls from people who desperately want to get help for their alcoholic or drug addicted loved one. And what they seem to hope for is a quick "cure". Instant gratification. They dont understand that its a process. Their loved one usually does not want help and they also dont know what to do themselves or else they would of done it. It takes patience. And as a loved one tries to help their family member or friend get clean, they often get frustrated in short order. Addiction to alcohol and drugs is a complex and diverse mix of issues that need to be address and corrected. All while their addicted loved one is psychologically,  physiologically and also physically addicted. This needs to be rooted out and corrected in order for the compulsive pull of addiction to be reduced enough so that long term recovery is possible.


                                      My first attempt at helping another addict get clean

When I was about one and a half years sober I had my first real attempt at helping an addict get clean. It was a challenge I was not yet ready for.  I met Tonia Dunbar on the streets of Evanston Illinois. I was waiting for Edwardos pizza restaurant to open so I could apply for a job menial job there delivering pizza. After my real estate salesman career collapsed in a big way I was forced to take a job doing whatever paid cash. And pizza delivery seemed my only choice given my circumstances. I had gotten to Edwardos two hours before they were to open and was just waiting in my car listening to the radio to pass the time.

Thats when I happened upon Tonia, xxxxxx

OCD and Epilepsy, The many causes to psychological disorders.

To get a psychological disorder does not mean a distant relative was a looney. Genetic makeup is a huge factor in getting a disorder but not the only factor to cause it. Brain damage or trauma can trigger a disorder. Epilepsy and brain convulsions along with strep infections can trigger permanent OCD. Sociopaths usually become that way when they are shown no love by their parents. Hence they grow up unable to feel emotions normally. If a childs parents never loved them then why should a stranger. But usually there seems to be an underlying factor that makes a child more prone to sociopathy and when raised in the right (or wrong I should say) they become cold and calculated feeling no emotion.

Can psychological disorders be prevented? In some cases maybe. But how is a parent to accept the fact that they are the cause of triggering sociopathy in their children. How do you prevent a person from getting an epileptic seizure? Even though we know some causes to disorders this doesnt meaan we can prevent them or cure them. We can better understand them and hope this helps with future treatment or possible prevention but thats about all we could do. Once the brain is damaged theres no reversing it. But future advances could lay the  foundation for more cures.

I had high fever convulsions when I was a child which led to my getting OCD. In brazil in the early 1990s they had a major epidemic of strep throat. tens of thousands of kids got strep throat and afterward it was noticed that over 5 percent of those affected with strep throat became permanently ill with Torrettes and OCD.

Psychological Trauma is the root to Self Harming.

This question from Yahoo Answers is a great illustration of what and why a self harmer cuts.
""

Mom found out about self harm and is ignoring me?

So I wrote a letter to my mom telling her about my self harm and now she is ignoring me..she pretends I don't even exist and she's told my dad that i'm only allowed to wear long sleeves and on really hot days I can pretend that my arm is sprained and wear bandages btw it's summer. I feel so ashamed...I can't take it!!! It would take forever to explain my story..let's just say there is a lot of physical, psychological, and emotional abuse going on in my house.       "


To help a self harmer to recover and stop harming is a very difficult thing. It takes time and patience and therapy. Very deep therapy. As this boy describes that he comes from an abusive household. How does a child leave a home when he is not grown enough to understand how to make it on his own. The abuse will continue until he is old enough to be on his own. What child wants to turn in an abusive parent or parents. The state will bring havoc in his life if he does. Its very difficult working with adolescent victims of abuse and neglect. Often times they dont get help until they are a young adult. By that time they often have turned to drugs and alcohol to cope.


"AS THE TWIG IS BENT SO SHALL THE TREE GROW"

The push to legalize marijuana is all about tax money and not about safety

Our country is on the verge of a movement which has a goal of legalizing pot to make tax revenue and not much else. Marijuana is extremely toxic. Its also highly potent compared to what the president and senators used to smokebas kids. Legalizing pot will help put the cartels in mexico out of business but watch as they use straw buyers to open businesses and invade this worrying Industry like locusts. Our country is undergoing a massive transition into becoming a poorer less prosperous nation. Local and federal governments in every state are quiety facing shadow bankruptcy. Most struggle to continue to pay the pensions of retired workers and keep up with daily services. They are using every trick they know to tax and fee residents to death. So why not make money taxing legalized marijuana. The attorney general of the united states would also like to end sending all these people to prison for marijuana possession and selling "crimes". I can study this in-depth with you here fir the pros and cons but want simply to get this point across. Life is not fair and there never will be simple answers. But with the legalization of marijuana expect to see higher cancer rates along with nore people starting on marijuana as a gateway drug to other harder more deadly drugs. Expect to see more traffic deaths and also expect to see more kids buying it as it becomes "accepted". The government will also soon want in on more profits so they will take over the growing and selling role on many fronts. This isnt good news but then what are the answers. Everything in life goes through cycles and in twenty years when the global economy has hopefully healed look for marijuana legalization to be reconsidered for the reasons I just brought up. Its a tough society. We need to be good parents and educate our children to the dangers of any type of drug use that alters our minds in such a strong addictive way.