The Risks of Recovery: Living in Abundance
@ Kimberly Dennis, MD, Timberline Knolls Residential Treatment CenterSeptember, 2010
For more than 20 years, we have been observing a national Recovery Month, a time to celebrate the progress being made, and also needed, in treatment and recovery. The theme of this year’s event, “Now More Than Ever,” hits at how far we have come and how much work is left to be done, providing treatment resources and help for those suffering from drug or alcohol addiction.
Though the need to focus attention on addiction and recovery is important every day of every month, designating a month as a community to focus on the issues related to recovery gives experts and recovering people all over the nation a platform to talk. This provides an opportunity to educate the public about the disease of addiction, the warning signs of substance abuse or dependence and the realities of treatment and recovery. It is a month to chip away at the deep and pervasive denial and minimization of substance abuse as a national health problem, killing scores of people, young and old, every day. While addiction remains a problem in the U.S. and around the world, treatment providers and society have made significant strides in the recovery movement, transforming the lives of thousands of Americans. We are ahead of where we were 10 years ago…progress, not perfection!
Of course, getting here has not been Easy Street. A brief history of alcohol in America reveals Americans drank between three and four times as much per capita in the Colonial period than today. Since then, alcohol use has ebbed and flowed in the U.S.; a national binge at the turn of the twentieth century led to Prohibition from 1920-1933. Jump to 2008 – the National Survey on Drug Use and Health reports more than 23 million people needed treatment for a substance abuse disorder in the U.S. There were 4.4 million ER visits related to the misuse of alcohol and drugs, both illicit and prescription, and except for cocaine, most of those visits involved individuals younger than age 30 (the 35 - 44 group claimed the most ER visits related to cocaine). Alcoholism, illicit and prescription drug abuse, nicotine addiction and food addiction are commonly at the root of the major causes of morbidity in the U.S. Cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, motor vehicle accidents and firearms are all among the top ten killers each year.
The medical and insurance communities historically have focused resources and time on the symptoms of these diseases while neglecting to acknowledge, address, treat and/or fund treatment for the addictions fueling the medical morbidities. God-willing, as a professional community, we will continue to make progress in this area. We know early and adequate intervention make for the best overall prognosis for people with addictions. I can speak to that personally…getting into recovery as a medical student, at the bottom rung of the medical community, has profoundly changed the course of my life (I’m still alive for starters!) and deeply influenced the trajectory of my career.
Whatever the case, substance abuse and addiction are equal opportunity offenders – affecting the young, old, poor, rich, educated, ignorant, men, women and everything in between. Addiction is a deadly, progressive disease, but it is TREATABLE. No one I’ve treated has planned or asked to have an addiction or eating disorder. Nor did the people I treated as a medical resident ask to have cancer or sickle cell or type I diabetes. And none of them have recovered alone. All have needed and been willing to receive treatment for their diseases. You can’t recover alone, but you can recover. You won’t get your old life back, but the one you will receive in recovery will be infinitely more abundant. The blessing in having alcoholism, substance addiction or food addiction is that through the process of recovery you get the chance to become “weller than the well!” And that requires a community. Developing faith in a loving Higher Power is a critical part of it – a part that cannot be done alone. The help of a sponsor, a home group and for many people, treatment by addiction professionals, are necessary components of healing. To put it simply: ask for help, surrender to the help you find, and live abundantly in recovery a day at a time for the rest of your life. I don’t know that the whole country is ready for the abundant living that recovery offers…I take the resistance to diagnosis and limited funding of treatment for alcoholism and addiction as evidence to the contrary. I am grateful for every single soul who is ready and willing to live abundantly, and the growing communities of those in recovery every day.
As always, I encourage you to email questions you have about eating disorders, substance abuse, recovery or topics you would like me to address in an upcoming column to kdennis@timberlineknolls.com. I look forward to hearing from you.
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