Sober Transitions

New Generation Gap as Older Addicts Seek Help

New Generation Gap as Older Addicts Seek Help

By JANE GROSS

Published: March 6, 2008 - NY Times

Across the country, substance abuse centers are reaching out to older addicts who have historically been ignored.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — All is peaceful and orderly on the older adult unit at Hanley Center, where substance abusers over the age of 55 are spared the noisy swagger of addicts half their age across the campus.

In their separate oasis, alcoholics and prescription drug abusers of a certain age do not curse at one another, raise their voices in anger or blast music at midnight. They don’t brag about their macho pasts or stage drama-queen breakups on the communal pay phone. They show up on time for therapy groups.

“We have different health issues, different emotional issues, different grief issues,” said Patrick Gallagher, 66, who was treated here for a dual addiction to pain medication and alcohol. “We need more peace and quiet and a different pace.”

Across the country, substance abuse centers are reaching out to older addicts whose numbers are growing and who have historically been ignored. There are now residential and outpatient clinics dedicated to those over 50, special counselors just for them at clinics that serve all ages, and screenings at centers for older Americans and physicians’ offices to identify older people unaware of their risk.  continue reading article

What Addicts NEED! A Cover Story by Newsweek!

Regardless of which side of the fence your thinking lies, this is an interesting article about the possible medical advances to aid in the fight against the disease of addiction.  Increased awareness, research and education around the disease of addiction is both welcomed and much needed! 

Newsweek - Mar 3, 2008 issue

COVER STORY: SCIENCE

      

What Addicts Need

      

       

Addiction isn't a weakness; it's an illness. Now vaccines and other new drugs may change the way we treat it.

Annie Fuller knew she was in trouble a year ago, when in the space of a few hours she managed to drink a male co-worker more than twice her size under the table. Of course, she'd been practicing for a quarter of her life by then; at 47, she was pouring a pint of bourbon, a 12-pack of beer and a couple of bottles of wine into her 115-pound body each day. She had come to prefer alcohol to food, sex or the company of friends and loved ones. Her marriage had ended; she had virtually stopped leaving the house, except to work and to drink. Fuller had tried and failed enough times over the years to know that she would not be able to sober up on her own. The last time she'd stopped drinking her body went into violent seizures, a common and terrifying symptom of alcohol withdrawal. But the single mother and mortgage-company VP refused to sign into rehab. "I live in a small town," she says. "And when you go to a hospital for something like that, everybody knows about it." So when a family doctor told her about Vivitrol, a monthly injection that prevents patients from drinking alcohol by obliterating its ability to intoxicate, Fuller agreed. She took a sabbatical from work, sent her 15-year-old daughter to stay with relatives and hunkered down to weather the painful, frightening blizzard of detoxification in the comfort of her own living room.          

What does it mean to be an addict? For a long time the answer was that someone like Fuller "lacked willpower," a tautology that is pretty much useless as a guide to treatment. In the current jargon of the recovery movement, addiction to alcohol, drugs or nicotine is a "bio-psycho-social-spiritual disorder," a phrase that seems to have been invented by the treatment industry to emphasize how complex the problem is and how much more funding it deserves. But the word itself comes from the Latin addictus, a debtor who was indentured to work off what he owed; someone addicted to alcohol or drugs is powerless over his or her fate in the same way—except debtors-as-addicts can never fully balance the books. It had been years since the pleasure of drinking outweighed the pain it caused Fuller. Looked at that way, the "social" and "spiritual" aspects of her problem seem insignificant compared with the contribution of biology. If you weigh advances in neuroscience over the last few decades against social and spiritual progress, it's clear which field is more likely to produce the next breakthrough in treatments.

continue reading article

      

Quote of the Day

again..... by Nelson Mandela

There is nothing like returning
to a place that remains unchanged
to find the ways
in which you yourself have altered.

New Generation Gap as Older Addicts Seek Help

In their separate oasis, alcoholics and prescription drug abusers of a certain age do not curse at one another, raise their voices in anger or blast music at midnight. They don’t brag about their macho pasts or stage drama-queen breakups on the communal pay phone. They show up on time for therapy groups.

“We have different health issues, different emotional issues, different grief issues,” said Patrick Gallagher, 66, who was treated here for a dual addiction to pain medication and alcohol. “We need more peace and quiet and a different pace.”

Across the country, substance abuse centers are reaching out to older addicts whose numbers are growing and who have historically been ignored. There are now residential and outpatient clinics dedicated to those over 50, special counselors just for them at clinics that serve all ages, and screenings at centers for older Americans and physicians’ offices to identify older people unaware of their risk.

Addiction specialists and organizations for the elderly anticipate a tidal wave of baby boomers needing help for addictions, often for different substances and with different attitudes toward treatment than the generation that came before them. Federal data shows ........... (continue reading)

Excerpted from the New York Times article on March 6, 2008.

Drinking Doesn't Make You Forget Your Troubles, According to Research!

Not only can't you drink your troubles away, but ethanol actually reinforces memories, according to Japanese scientists.

AFP reported Feb. 29 that University of Tokyo researcher Norio Matsuki and colleagues tried to condition rats to fear by giving them shocks followed by immediate injections of either ethanol or saline. They found that the rats that received the ethanol injections froze with fear longer, and that their fear reaction lasted for an average of two weeks.

"If we apply this study to humans, the memories they are trying to get rid of will remain strongly, even if they drink alcohol to try to forget an event they dislike and be in a merry mood for the moment," the authors wrote.

The study was published in the Feb. 20, 2008 issue of the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

Excerpted on 3/3/08  from Research News on Join Together.