Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
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Yes, more drunk driving stories. I find it interesting how public attitudes towards drinking and driving are slowly changing. It seems that an Oregon man left work and started drinking beers in his car from a cooler as he was driving home. On the way home he managed to get very drunk and slammed into a stopped or slow moving car on the side of the road. He killed all 4 people in that car but, he himself, was seemingly unharmed. The police came and found the man had 4 prior convictions for driving under the influence of an intoxicant. After being brought to the hospital the man refused a blood test to determine his blood alcohol count but submitted to one 3 hours later. The test registered a blood alcohol level of 3 times the legal limit of .08. He later pleaded guilty to 4 counts of first degree manslaughter and was sentenced to 43 years in prison. So do not drink and drive….. A ‘drunk driver error’ resulted in the arrest of a Van Buren County, Michigan man. It seems that the drunk driver was heading home around 2 am and started to get sick. So he quickly pulls into the nearest parking lot but misses and ends up on the lawn where he got sick and passed out. The parking lot and lawn he ended up on contained the local State Police barracks… They merely walked outside, woke him up and arrested him. His blood alcohol count was twice the legal limit. I’m sure everyone has heard this before but….substance abuse in America is increasing at a scary rate. Did you know that over the last 10 years the number of substance abusers has more than doubled from an estimated 6 million abusers to a current record of 15 million drug abusers. And most of this increase is due to abuse of prescription drugs. And even though the number of dug abusers has risen 150% the amount of drug treatment programs has not changed in 10 years. There is virtually no treatment for a substance abuse problem! The media used to refer to the rising drug problem as ‘the war on drugs’ which fostered an attitude that drug users do not live next door, so called ‘normal’ people do not have such a problem… But this view is slowly changing; with the increasing number of professional people being cited as having substance abuse problems, the ‘war on drugs’ is now the ‘war on ourselves’. More than ever before, people are openly admitting they have a substance abuse problem except there is little to no treatment available! Successful marketing programs funded by the pharmaceuticals coupled with an increase in the number of wriiten prescriptions has resulted in an out-of-control abuse of legal drugs. We are conditioned from birth to take a ‘pill’ to ‘make it all better’. Anxiety is dealt with through benzodiazepines – pop a Xanax and feel better. ‘Mothers little helper’ in the 50s and 60s was nothing more than a pill to supress anger and frustration in other words, a mood stabilizer. If we have a headache we reach for the aspirin, tylenol or ibuprophine. There is a pill for every conceivable disease and condition and we all take them… Do you personally know of anyone who does not take pills for something, whether aspirin or prescription medication? I don’t. It’s scary… Anyone with a few years in the working world will agree with this…bureaucracy sucks. ‘Never underestimate the stupidity of people in large groups’. I have been working for a living for close to 32 years now and I dislike (hate) bureaucracies. In one way they actually perform a function in that a general and uniform code of behavior and ethics is established but the downfall is the sometimes complete depersonalization of the individual being served. And in a corporation whose job is to serve those who need help in whatever way…this depersonalization is downright sad. Case in point: My job was to model so-called ‘normal’ behavior for an individual recovering from substance abuse who also had a co-occurring mental instability. To perform my job I went to see this individual, who we will call Tom, every working day to bring him out in society and teach him how to interact in any conceivable situation. And I started this job right after Tom, who was living in his own apartment, relapsed and threatened physical violence to his case manager which landed him in a ‘lock-down’ ward for the violently behaviorally disturbed. Yes, I was starting at a disadvantage but I persevered for a year teaching Tom all the ways to survive in the real world. But I could not overcome his fear of being independent. Tom learned rather quickly that in a hospital situation such as his the person who ’screams’ the loudest will get the attention…negative attention, maybe, but attention nonetheless. Tom learned that violent behavior was the way to get everyone at the hospital focused on him, especially the female nurses whose attention he so desperately craved. Yes, it got him physically restrained but it also got him a woman holding his hand and speaking softly to him for an hour or so to calm him down. Anyone with a basic concept of behaviorism will see how reinforcing this was… Tom was now not allowed to own or see any violent or sexually explicit movies but this did not bother him; whenever he was in the mood for such movies he would merely borrow the DVD’s from fellow inmates and watch them. Tom now listened closely to staff for guidelines as to his behavior. For instance, if the local doctor said, ‘low fat diet’ then Tom would make it his business to ‘pig out’; in fact he ballooned up to 350 pounds when this happened. Whatever staff did not want, Tom did…he was manipulating staff and the bureaucracy. I was relegated to a side attraction, a vehicle for upsetting staff in that I took him into the world for him to perform his mischief but the real ‘golden ring’ was the female nurse attention. Suffice it to say that Tom’s behavior became worse and worse to the point that he threatened suicide by smashing a CD and threatening to cut his wrists. It was all a ploy in my mind, because I witnessed this, but the CD proved sharper than Tom realized so he actually did cut his wrists. I remember the shocked look on his face as the blood gushed from his arm. Later, my place of employment who really serviced those in a somewhat stable frame of mind, gave up and we dropped him… All that potential wasted… And when we dropped him I was not allowed to give him any advance notice of when I was leaving or to even tell him I was leaving for fear that this would cause his violent behavior to escalate. I remember that last day being with Tom, eating out and planning what to do the next week, all the while unable to say ‘goodbye’ to this person I had grown to care about over the past year. In this case the bureaucracy did Tom an inservice which I got to witness first hand; instead of helping him in a proactive way we merely reacted to his manipulatory behavior. The real victim here is Tom…. The ‘Closing the Addiction Treatment Gap’ or CATG, a national program composed of at least 9 separate organizations, was founded to increase awareness of addiction and help provide more resources for addiction treatment. It is estimated that 4 out of 5 Americans requiring addiction treatment do not receive it. The CATG organized and ran valid, well run studies to determine the effectiveness of addiction treatment, especially counseling. They have found that people who receive addiciton treatment will use less health care money for emergency room visits, hospitalizations, etc than those receiving no treatment. Thus addiction treatment can now be viewed as a valid way to help reduce health care expenses. Electroshock therapy for Internet Addiction….I could not let this one pass. It seems that China has implemented a rather controversial therapy to induce conformity and cure Internet addiction – electroshock. China currently has 300 million internet users and that figure is growing (isn’t that almost the population of the USA?). With so many using the Internet day in and day out there will inevitably be problems and the main recognized problem is IAD or Internet Addiction Disorder. And how is this being defined? It’s the pursuit of the Internet instead of working or studying and having adverse reactions if not on the Internet. And one must be on the Internet for at least 6 hours straight each day to qualify. And you must be involved in one of these major Internet activities: porn, gambling, social networking, shopping or general surfing. This seems to cover all Internet usage for anyone, anywhere in my opinion. It seems that 3000 young people were tricked or coerced into signing up for a 3 month long course designed to cure one of Internet tendencies via electroshock. The course cost the equivalent of over $800 per month and ended once the patient admitted to their addiction. Electroshock was delivered for a violation of any of the Institute’s 86 rules among which included eating chocolate, taking pills before a meal or locking the bathroom door. Patients were forced to talk about nothing but their Internet addiction and forced to kneel before their parents and confess their Internet ‘wrongdoings’. Details of this ‘treatment’ became public when former patients got online and talked about their experiences. Do you feel an electroshock coming on? I certainly do…time to log off. I spent 8 months as a counselor intern in what I’ll call a ‘recovery center’ for lack of a better word. It was a place where people socialize, attend AA meditation meetings and attend groups oriented toward personal growth. This was a time when I practiced group facilitation and individual counseling but mostly it was to learn more about myself to see if I would make a good counselor. And to see if I even wanted to do it. I did enjoy it but it was a tough time: doing an internship in addition to normal work hours is hard enough but one designed to make you face your inner self….? Extremely hard and discouraging at times. Also very rewarding. The internship finished the beginning of May and I was invited back today to see everyone and to attend a special luncheon centered around 3 AA speakers. As usual the group setting, the speakers and the comradeship were inspirational; I realized what I had been missing the last 2 months – security in a group. Some notable thoughts from the meeting (paraphrased): “You’ll never have it all so once you learn to celebrate your life and be thankful for what you do have, you will be happy.” “You do not go through the 12 steps just once, you make them part of your life and use them every day.” “We, alone, are responsible for taking drugs and drinking. No one is forcing us to do it.” “Drinking is done to fill the ‘black hole’. The problem is it’s bottomless.” “Start drinking for self medication and watch everything of value in your life slowly vanish until you have nothing.” The ultimate causes of drug addiction have been widely theorized in the past as genetic, bad environment and even moral choice. The ‘moral choice’ theory went away a long time ago and addiction was seen more as a disease. A new theory by Heyman (his book, “Addiction; A Disorder of Choice”) is once again labeling addiction as a series of bad choices. He believes that many addictions are overcome once the real life consequences of addictive behavior are realized making addiction a response to an out-of-control life. Heyman further believes that labeling addiction as a disease will provide a crutch for many addicts to lean on and not give up the addiction. That is a simple explanation and not all inclusive so to see more look up this author and book if you are interested. This is a short story about Jerry, a person with a co-occurring disorder meaning substance abuse with a mental disability. Did the mental disability cause the substance abuse or did the substance abuse result in the mental disability? We will never know… Here is a history of Jerry: Jerry began drinking constantly shortly after he had what the doctors back then termed, “a break with reality”. He had lived alone with his mother who drank all day and Jerry would buy her the alcohol. It wasn’t long before Jerry began drinking himself, all day every day. He would sit in the apartment with his mother, drinking and chain-smoking, talking to invisible people while his mother slept. As the years passed, Jerry who was now in his late teens began losing his tenuous grasp of reality and with it went any social skills including self-care skills. Food rotted in the refrigerator, neither mother nor son ever washed and soon it became too much for Jerry to travel to the bathroom in the middle of the night when the urge hit – the corner of the room now sufficed. His mother’s social security kept them both in booze and Jerry drank and smoked every waking minute. When rent was not being paid the landlord stepped in followed by state authorities which landed Jerry in a residential setting for the mentally disturbed and his mother in a convalesent home. Jerry had no problem with this at all until he discovered that he would not be drinking anymore… A nasty detox was followed by some heavy duty medications and Jerry has been sober for quite a few years now, more or less. His last remaining vice is smoking, but his cigarettes are held by staff and apportioned to him at no more than 2 per hour. Jerry is physically clean and has been through self help training to educate him in his ADL’s (activities of daily living). Even Jerry’s money, the disability he gets each month, is held by staff. But Jerry still saves his pennies by not returning all the change for a bought item and conveniently losing the receipt. When he has enough pennies he hightails it to the bar up the street to down a few quick beers. Fortunately, Jerry’s case manager suspects when this will happen and usually catches and stops him going into the bar before he can buy a drink. Jerry’s life is now smoking and thinking about drinking… Fortunately his meds are designed to reduce his cravings for alcohol. Jerry will eventually attend an AA group, is going to individual counseling and will hopefully venture out on his own and in better control of himself someday… He is working on it… |
 
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