For you Australians who’ve just come to visit this site, thanks for your interest! I’ve taken about a three-week break from blogging, but I’ll post again very soon. Meanwhile, you might want to catch up with some of the topics we’ve tossed back and forth on the blog. We’ve had some excellent dialogues, but will be moving on to new territory. Also, check out the Guest Memoirs page, and feel free to send me yours if you feel like contributing.
The site was first launched as publicity for my book. But now the blog has taken on a life of its own. Our main topic is addiction, obviously, and recovery, and the variety of paths to recovery. But there’s also a science undercurrent, and I try to touch on a neuroscience perspective in most of my posts. The neuroscience of addiction is a key interest of mine (having been both an addict and a neuroscientist), and the blog has been invaluable for me to link it up with real life.
So…..welcome!
For all readers, Happy New Year!!! I’m looking forward to more posts and more of the in-depth dialogues we’ve had in the past. More soon…
Informed by unparalleled neuroscientific insight and written with his usual flare, Marc Lewis’s The Biology of Desire effectively refutes the medical view of addiction as a brain disease. A bracing and informative corrective to the muddle that now characterizes public and professional discourse on this topic.” —Gabor Maté, M.D., author of In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction
Hi,
Yes, I’m an Australian! I’ve been lurking around these forums for a while now. I find this blog great because it gives a view of addiction and recovery different to the prevailing one, which seems to be the ‘disease’ model where abstinence is the only ‘cure’. Although this model has worked for the first three years of my recovery, but it has now stopped working for me.
Thus, I’m kind of reconfiguring my recovery now; getting into harm reduction; changing my relationship with alcohol and drugs from abstinence to controlled use (which has involved me doing some ‘experiments’ with responsible drinking and drug use, and hasn’t ended in ‘relapse’ – actually i much prefer waking up without a hangover these days). This reality is, for me, very different to the somewhat ‘fire and brimstone’ theory i was taught in 12 step program of what will happen if an addict uses in recovery.
It’s great to see people here redefining what recovery means for them.
Anyway, I look forward to becoming more active in the discussions.
Thanks,
Cyborgeous
Good to hear! Yes we (this blog community) seem to be quite happy with the harm reduction approach, as well as many other approaches to recovery. I think, I hope, that what’s most unique here IS that openness. There are many roads to Rome.
So welcome aboard and good luck with reconfiguring your recovery. I think a lot of people do that. I’ve done it myself. It’s really just “development” — not remaining static.