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There isn’t any cure, besides just stopping. And how many of them can do that? They don’t want to, you see. When they feel bad like this fellow here, they think they want to stop, but they don’t, really. They can’t bring themselves to admit they’re alcoholics, or that liquor’s got them licked. They believe they can take it or leave it alone – so they take it. If they do stop, out of fear or…
The Man with the Golden Arm is one of the first post-WWII era novels to document the difficulties soldiers experienced when readjusting to civilian life. Nelson Algren, the author, himself served in WWII as a medical corpsan, and he intended to write novels about experiences he had on the battlefield. After coming back to Chicago and observing how his fellow soldiers had trouble integrating into…
Six Nights with the Washingtonians is a collection of temperance stories inspired by Timothy Shay Arthur’s real experiences with the rehabilitation stories he heard from the Washington Temperance Society.
In the 1990s, Czech researchers like Tomas Zabransky, Michal Mivosky, and Viktor Mravick argued that addiction research was too divided between psychiatry, criminology, social work, and other disciplines. The concept of “addictology” was conceived as a specialized interdisciplinary effort to approach addiction. Charles University in Prague developed a unique “addictology” program across…
I’ve said a few times that I wished there was something like a pamphlet you got when you entered a treatment center that starts with “Welcome to Addiction! Addiction is a disability, and that means you have rights and programs you can explore dedicated to people with disabilities.” Surely something so critical must have been distilled into an accessible format by now in this world of millions of…
Anyone who says they have a “simple secret” to anything immediately flags my snake oil detector. I think there are as many “get-happy-quick” schemes as “get-rich-quick” schemes. “When I was 10 years old, things started shifting between my parents and not for the better. One day, they called a family meeting… they told us that we’d be moving from our little log cabin in northern British…
In 1977, the National Council on Alcoholism (now called the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, NCADD) established a journal called Alcohol: Clinical and Experiment Research (ACER). It followed a major expansion in alcohol research in 1970 through the creation of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). Biomedical, clinical, and behavioral studies were all…
This book is a collection of fictional tales warning young readers about alcohol, which was somewhat typical for temperance movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was published in London by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and pushed the framework at the time that alcohol was itself inherently dangerous in its consumption of personal agency and moral sensibilities. To be…
There are various anecdotes floating around about Walt Whitman writing this temperance novel while heavily drinking himself, which does explain why critics have called it “an incoherent and often aesthetically dissatisfying text.” The historian David Reynolds biographical accounts of Whitman include a claim that he wrote the novel in three days while drinking heavily. However, there seems to be…
Some scholars argue that “Maria Lamas” is likely a pseudonym used by a female author in order to publish a work that would otherwise be seen as too transgressive or gruesome for a woman to write. The titular female protagonist, Helen More, is a woman born into a wealthy family and constrained by both patriarchal institutions and the influence of alcohol on herself and the men in her life. Rather…
The Moonstone: A Romance is one of the earliest modern detective novels and strikes a little close to home. The namesake jewel in the novel is associated explicitly with Chandra, the god representing the Moon in Hinduism, which is also what my name translates to. It also helped popularize the trope of jewels being taken from a colonized and oppressed peoples before being taken again through an…
If you like this book and feel it has been helpful in your life, don’t read the rest of this review. I will always preface everything I have to say about life advice or self-help or spirituality with the caveat that if it works for you, you don’t need me or anyone else to approve it. I don’t know you or your life’s circumstances. I don’t know what works or doesn’t for you. This review is for the…
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I’ve said a few times that I wished there was something like a pamphlet you got when you entered a treatment center that starts with “Welcome to Addiction! Addiction is a disability, and that means you have rights and programs you can explore dedicated to people with disabilities.” Surely something so critical must have been distilled into an accessible format by now in this world of millions of…
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https://library.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/sma14-4474.pdf