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We're moving!

This blog will be moving over the next week or so, so we'll be quiet for about a week.

Blogger is ending the FTP service this blog uses tomorrow and Dawn Farm's website will soon be updated and will be using Wordpress. Hoped to have the blog moved by tomorrow, oh well. Short of having the move completed, I hoped to have all the details by now, but I don't. :-(

You'll be able to find our new home by visiting www.dawnfarm.org or revisiting this post. (I think I'll be able to update it.) I also plan to update the feedburner feed, so people who use that should not have to do anything.

If all goes well, we'll be back up by next week.

Measuring recovery

The Art of Life Itself has a post linking to 2 documents that compile instruments measuring recovery or some aspect of recovery. (That seemed like a wordy and awkward sentence. I left my brain in bed this morning.)

Tab dump

• Don’t Call It ‘Pot’ in This Circle; It’s a Profession
• Reinventing Yourself: Part 1 — A Neurological Case for Recovering People to Journal
• Thinking About Tomorrow
• When the Country Went Cold Turkey
  

The findings of this study seem to be pretty striking. I haven't had a chance to ready the actual paper to see how robust the outcomes were. They controlled for authoritative parenting style. It seems to suggest that R-rated films  are powerful advertising vehicles for drinking. The third link would seem to support the power of advertising.

• Keeping kids away from R-rated movies may prevent early drinking
• Parental R-Rated Movie Restriction and Early-Onset 
• Alcohol Use*
• Young Drinkers Influenced More by Alcohol Ads than by Athletes' Drinking Behavior

Customer Service?

I decided to do a search for "customer service" and "behavioral health". The results are pathetic. I have a feeling that this says something pretty troubling about behavioral health services.

Alcoholism, Family and the Limits of Love | World of Psychology

Bill White reviews the tv movie airing this Sunday, When Love is Not Enough:

When Love is Not Enough is clearly more than a love story, though it is surely that. Readers of Psych Central and the people they serve will discover in this movie six profound lessons about the impact of alcoholism and alcoholism recovery on intimate relationships and the family.

1. Prolonged cultural misunderstandings about the nature of alcoholism have left a legacy of family shame and secrecy.

2. Alcoholism is a family disease in the sense that it also wounds those closest to the alcohol dependent person; transforms family relationships, roles, rules, and rituals; and isolates the family from potential sources of extended family, social, and community support.

3. The family experience of alcoholism is often one of extreme duality.

4. Family recovery from alcoholism is a turbulent, threatening and life-changing experience.

5. We cannot change another person, only ourselves.

6. The wonder of family recovery.

How much do we know?

Clinical Evidence offers a pie chart that categorizes medical treatments (All medical treatments. This is not specific to addiction.) by their known effectiveness.

Use evidence-based approaches is important in all services, human and otherwise, but it's easy to forget that the concept is not that simple--there are political factors, publication bias, research bias, real world vs. research considerations, individual client factors, practitioner factors, environmental factors, etc. When thinking about evidence-based approaches in the context of behavioral health, it's also easy to lose sight of the larger medical context.

Figure 1 illustrates the percentage of treatments falling into each category. Dividing treatments into categories is never easy hence our reliance on our large team of experienced information specialists, editors, peer reviewers and expert authors. Categorisation always involves a degree of subjective judgement and is sometimes controversial. We do it because users tell us it is helpful, but judged by its own rules the categorisation is certainly of unknown effectiveness and may well have trade offs between benefits and harms. However, the figures above suggest that the research community has a large task ahead and that most decisions about treatments still rest on the individual judgements of clinicians and patients.

End Insanity Of The War on Drugs—Start With Decriminalizing Marijuana at The Federal Level

Ron Paul renews his call for marijuana decriminalization.

I'm not knee jerk about the matter, I don't think anyone should do jail time for simple possession, but these arguments would resonate more with me if they said something to address the social costs of drugs and alcohol. Alcohol prohibition was wrought with serious problems and I would never support its return, but alcohol consumption is tied to no small number of serious social problems and costs. (And it has an industry that's invested in shaping policy, beliefs and attitudes toward those problems and costs.)

As I've said before, a problem-free alcohol and drug policy is not possible. There will be problems with any policy. The question is which problems are we willing to live with and what can we do to mitigate them.

Tab Dump

• An Alcoholic’s Savior: God, Belladonna or Both? (Not news, but interesting. May say something about Bill Wilson's openness to LSD later in life.)
• Losing a voice of reason against ‘war on drugs’
  
• Soft war on drugs: Portugal shows how drug addiction, when treated as an illness and not as a crime, can be controlled effectively.
• Tanning bed usage can be as addictive as cannabis and alcohol (Ugh! I've said before that I worry about some of the neuroscience of drug addiction being replicated with all sorts of other compulsive behaviors. I don't believe that this will prove those behaviors are brain diseases or that addiction is not. Just that we understand less about the mechanisms of addiction than we think we do.)
• Reason.tv: 3 Reasons to Legalize Pot Now! (I find the first half of number one to be a terrible reason for legalization.)
• Why is Disulfiram Superior to Acamprosate in the Routine Clinical Setting? (Given the underwhelming evidence for disulfiram, what does this say about acomprosate? Can't get the full text yet.)

I give my autistic son pot

News from the medical marijuana front lines .

More on McLellan's departure

More on McLellan's departure.

Why Drug Addicts Are Getting Sterilized for Cash

Another story on Project Prevention. I've blogged about them before here and here.

What does it say that Time inserted this into the story?

(See the best and worst moms of all time.)

I think it speaks volumes about about the attitudes and stigma that this kind of program taps.

Think for a minute about the about the opening paragraphs:

When Joanne Chavarria's grandmother died last summer, she coped by turning to the bottle. "I started to drink. And then I started to smoke some weed. And then I started doing meth," says the 32-year old from Merced, California. Chavarria, who began abusing drugs at the age of 12, was eight months pregnant at the time. Last August, she gave birth to drug-addicted twins, and California's Child Protective Services took the infants, and Chavarria's three other children, into custody.

As with other addicts, the road to recovery for Chavarria began with counseling and a drug rehabilitation program. Less orthodox, however, was her decision to undergo a tubal ligation. "Addicts in my situation need to get their tubes tied," she says. "When you stop having kids it makes you think about what else you can do in life."

Chavarria had the procedure done after meeting with Project Prevention, a North Carolina-based charity that gives drug addicts $300 if they go on long-term birth control or undergo sterilization. The aim of Barbara Harris, 57, the organization's controversial founder, is to prevent addicts from having children they can't care for and reduce the number of babies born exposed to drugs.

"Last summer"?!?!?!

This article is dated April 17!

More concerns about DSM-V criteria

This concern speaks to some of my thoughts.

Others are more concerned, arguing that abuse should be thought of as a behavior and dependence as a disease, and by combining them it becomes easier for payers to deny clinically appropriate care. Even worse, it might signal a shift to the idea that any professional with "behavioral" health training would be eligible.

It's worth noting that is not an argument for the status quo. I've never been comfortable with abuse as a disorder.