Blog

This commitment involves the willingness to make changes and adopt healthier habits. It requires individuals to take responsibility for their actions, seek support, and develop coping mechanisms to navigate challenges that may arise along the way. In Recovery, Russell Brand shares an amusing yet valuable story of addiction and the path to sobriety. As a wildly famous celebrity, he struggled with more than just alcohol. But it’s easy to resonate with his emotions surrounding addiction, no matter your vice.

Nonfiction Books » Health & Lifestyle » Addiction

Why else would I have been mesmerized by When a Man Loves a Woman or 28 Days in my early 20s? These movies and books let me know I was not alone, that there were other people walking around who drank like I did. Dependency is startlingly unlike any other memoir about addiction—that I know of, at least. Next you’ve chosen to recommend Tove Ditlevsen’s Dependency, the third book in her Copenhagen Trilogy.

• She also goes into her tumultuous relationship with rocker Anthony Kiedis, whom she dated when she was 16 and he was 24 and struggling with a heroin addiction.
• 2000’s Cherry picked up the story by showing Karr as an adolescent, already dabbling with drugs and profoundly lacking any sense of belonging.
• A person of extraordinary intellect, Heather King is a lawyer and writer/commentator for NPR – as well as a recovering alcoholic who spent years descending from functional alcoholism to barely functioning at all.

The best books on The History of Medicine and Addiction, recommended by Louise Foxcroft

From her nomadic childhood in a military family to the pressures of reporting on harrowing news stories, she shares the challenges of adapting to new environments and the solace she found in alcohol. From the challenges of sober holidays to confronting the replacement of one addiction with another, her story goes beyond the conventional rehabilitation narrative, making it utterly compelling. While widely recognized for her professional achievements, Bryony’s personal struggle remained a secret until she bravely unveiled her recovery journey in this transformative book.

Beyond being informative, this powerful book has helped countless people dive deeper into their relationship with alcohol and make positive changes in their lives. He comes from the book publishing world and, again, was someone who was successful and smart, but in active addiction. He lost trust of people around him and in his field, but through sobriety he has been able to drug addiction treatment regain that trust and help many people along the way.

• She fearlessly explores the complexities of navigating social engagements without booze, shedding light on the societal pressures women face to drink in corporate settings and dating scenes.
• These books take you through the lives of seven individual addicts from all walks of life.
• This feeling of isolation can lead to depression, or make hard times even harder.
• In and out of rehab, he falls into relapse, engaging in toxic relationships and other self-destructive behaviors that threaten to undo the hard-won progress he’s made.
• GUTS is a true triumph—a memoir that manages to be as frank and revealing as Augusten Burroughs, yet as hilarious and witty as David Sedaris” (publisher blurb).

Commitment to Sobriety

When she’s a child, we’re presented with the world as a child might see it. When she’s hooked on Demetrol, we perceive events through the distorted viewpoint of an addict. This is the kind of myopic or unreliable narrator we encounter frequently in novels – conspicuously naïve or self-delusive, and unchaperoned by a consolingly wise authorial presence—but almost never in memoir. Told in the present tense (another rarity in autobiography), the result is a stunningly immersive and intimate story.

When combined with counseling, this approach is proven highly effective. The Italian cardiologist and fellow of the International Association for Cannabis as Medicine proposes five books on Medicinal Marijuana and explains why we should be reading them. For a nonfiction book that sheds light on the prescription drug crisis in the US, and how that came about, look no further than Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, which reads like a thriller. The information on this website is not intended to be a substitute for, or to be relied upon as, medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Addiction Memoirs: Seven Selected Titles

In other kinds, as in novels, endings are artifices of form, and the trick is not to let this feel true for the reader. But the challenge is particularly acute when the story is about a life that, as the reader well knows, has simply gone on and on beyond the final page. How do you craft an ending that makes narrative sense but which feels complex and inconclusive in the way life so often is?

The marketing strategies employed to sell booze to women are as alarming as the skyrocketing number of women who qualify as having alcohol use disorders. Ann’s book is such a unique and insightful combination of personal experience and scientific research. When I stopped drinking alcohol, I was desperate to know the stories of other people who’d also taken this road less traveled.

• Read together, they provide a powerful set of perspectives on the way addiction affects both the addict and those who care for them.
• Clegg’s manic spiral is related in a relentless present tense, in a prose that’s sparse and detached—and lit up by little flares of lyricism to conjure each hit.
• Next time I drank it would be different, next time it would make me feel good again.
• With simple, clear writing, she infuses the book with anecdotes and wise observations of her movement to sobriety.
• This collection of essays by famous American and Canadian writers explores addiction from unique points of view, but with the same underlying theme— addiction has heartbreaking consequences.

Louise Foxcroft chooses her best books on the history of medicine and addiction, looking at medical practices of the past, from treatment of madness and non-existent diseases, to drug use and the origins of hypochondria. Her own book, The Making of Addiction, looks at the use and abuse of opium in 19th-century Britain. I could not put this book down (literally), talk about gut-wrenching honesty and not holding anything back. When I worked in beauty, Cat was a beauty editor at Lucky and xoJane.com, so I knew of her.