Substance Abuse and Recovery: Recommended Books

Read the compelling story of one man who overcame insurmountable odds and found salvation from negativity and self-doubt. After a two-decade healing journey of intensive trauma therapy, psychiatric treatment, and rehab, Bruce W. Brackett has emerged a survivor. Anyone in the midst of their own healing journey will resonate with benefit from his lived experience, portrayed here with intimate vulnerability and universal appeal.

Cartoonist Julia Wertz chronicles her haphazard attempts at sobriety and the relentlessly challenging, surprisingly funny, and occasionally absurd cycle of addiction and recovery. Impossible People portrays the lesser told but more common story: That the road to recover is not always linear.

This comprehensive text provides readers with an overview of several major counseling theories and their application to substance use disorders and addiction counseling, along with related techniques and interventions.

In this book, leading bioethicist Gregory Pence demystifies seven foundational theories of addiction and addiction treatment. Each method holds foundation beliefs about human nature, free will, and biology.

Former Buddhist monk John Bruna outlines the seven skills of living mindfully in recovery--values, attention, wisdom, equanimity, compassion, loving-kindness, and action--utilizing lessons, meditations, reflections, andother daily practices.

Grisel shows how different drugs act on the brain, the kind of experiential effects they generate, and the specific reasons why each is so hard to kick. Grisel's insights lead to a better understanding of the brain's critical contributions to addictive behavior.

The misuse and abuse of prescription drugs has reached epidemic proportions in recent years, yet many individuals still believe, incorrectly, that their use is without risk. This book explores those risks as well as controversies surrounding this public health issue.

Offers an examination of drug use, abuse, and treatment, offering clinical and scientific knowledge, case studies, and policy suggestions intended to help drug users, their families, and communities deal with the problem.

After three decades of living in the sandy beach suburbs of Huntington Beach, Jon Vreeland's heroin addiction has finally destroyed his once promising music career, and estranged himself from his wife and his two daughters. This is the story of how he began to get out.

An empowering guide for recovering addicts and alcoholics from an author with lived experience and professional expertise. Janice V. Johnson Dowd shows readers how to repair and enhance their relationships after active addiction.

Despite decades of research and tens of thousands of published and peer-reviewed investigations, critics continue to ask whether addiction is a genuine medical condition or a choice. Leading expert in the science and treatment of addiction Suzette Glasner aims to clear the air of some of the most polarizing and misleading information that dominates public thinking about addiction.

The insidious opioid epidemic has ravaged American homes and communities for far too long. Three million American families have a loved one addicted to opioids, and fatal drug overdose is the number one cause of death for all Americans aged eighteen to forty-four. Dr. Baker weaves together the latest scientific research on addiction treatment, his reflections as a parent of a child with addiction, and Macky's own thoughts and writings to craft an essential, cutting-edge tome on why this crisis persists and how we must treat it.

This book presents a radically different addiction treatment paradigm, based on science, evidence and best practices. This model should profoundly upend the current addiction treatment industry. Instead of the current addict-focused approach, this model extends treatment to the entire support system, starting treatment with the concerned family members.

Drug overdoses now kill more Americans annually than guns, cars or breast cancer, but we have tried to solve this national crisis with policies that only made matters worse. We have maximized the spread of infectious disease, torn families apart, incarcerated millions of mostly Black and Brown people, and failed to make effective treatment for it widely available. There is another way, one that is proven to work. However, it runs counter to much of the received wisdom of our criminal and medical industrial complexes.

Prescription drug abuse takes many forms, from taking a friend's painkillers for your backache to misusing pills to lose weight or get high. The three classes of medications most commonly misused are opioids, central nervous system depressants, and stimulants.

A congresswoman and her son reveal how he survived a ten-year battle with opioid abuse--and what their family's journey to recovery can teach us about finding hope amid the unspeakable.

There is growing alarm over how drugs empower terrorists, insurgents, militias, and gangs. But by looking back not just years and decades but centuries, Peter Andreas reveals that the drugs-conflict nexus is actually an old story, and that powerful states have been its biggest beneficiaries.

Particular attention is given to the nature of addiction, including environmental, genetic, and developmental factors; with authors examining the short- and long-term effects of a variety of addictions such as drug, alcohol, gambling, food, sex, shopping, work, and video gaming to name a few.