Addiction & Mental Health Resources

Introduction

Brady grew up in a family that was very disconnected. Everyone seemed to do their own thing every day. Both of his parents had an addiction to drugs, but his parents tried to hide it from him. After getting his girlfriend pregnant, he decided to get married to try to do the honorable thing. At 25, he started working at a liquor store and began drinking very heavily.

While drinking at work one day, a man came through the drive-thru and had cocaine. Brady decided to try it and at 26 he developed a cocaine addiction within a very short period of time. He started using cocaine to wake him up and alcohol to help him when he needed to sleep.

Eventually, he got a job working for a phone bank where he maintained a job for two years. During those two years, he was not only drinking and doing cocaine but also started using pain pills. After injuring his back, Brady’s mother gave him a pain pill to try to ease the pain. He liked the way that it made him feel and began using them frequently. Within a year of working at the bank, he realized that he needed the drugs and alcohol to feel the way that he wanted to feel. He tried to stop using at one point because he was spending so much money so quickly. He wasn’t worried about health risks or legal risks. He just cared about decreasing the amount of money he was spending on drugs and alcohol. [Taken from YT description]

Read more about Brady’s story here.

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Quotes

“I started drinking at the end of my shift and it became a more common thing. It started off a couple times a week and then it became four or five times a week … it became more and more frequent.“

“The cocaine addiction escalated very quickly and that increased my drinking quite a bit. If I wanted to wake up, to sober up a bit and continue the party a little bit, I would do some cocaine. If I wanted to go to sleep, or I wanted to take it down a little bit, I would do some drinking. As so I kind of began to control my moods with drugs and alcohol.“

“He [a doctor] said, ‘Everybody has so much they can drink in their entire life. You’ve already drank all yours, you’re done. If you continue to drink, you’re going to die.’ That was enough to get me to quit drinking but it wasn’t enough to keep me from everything else.”

“There was no real plan of anything. It was just me doing what I had to do to be okay, to try to make things work and try to get by. Not a whole lot of extra thought other than, I need to make sure that I stay loaded because if I’m not loaded, I’m not going to be okay. I had lost hope at that point … I felt as though life was meant for suffering, life was a punishment, there was nothing good in life. So I was really depressed and I thought about that all the time, about the idea that everybody would have been better off without me and my life is meaningless, my life is pointless.”

“On that final relapse, from the minute I drank for the first time, there was no relief to be found. I didn’t get that relief that you would think you get, it just never came. Just that old hopelessness of, ‘What am I doing? What’s the point?‘ I fell back into that mindset as soon as I drank … I went back to the treatment center … I threw myself into it even though I didn’t really feel like it.”

“I fell into this circle of friends that I have today. We do so much stuff together, whatever free time I have I spend with those people. They actually care about me as a human being and I care about them.”

“I get emotional and I have difficulties and there’s certain things that I don’t like but I always make my recovery number one, no matter what, even if I don’t feel like it and it’s been a life-changing experience.”

Recovery

• Getting Sober and Staying Sober: How to Make Recovery Stick
• Mindful Addiction Recovery
• Russell Brand’s Speech on Drugs, Addiction, & Recovery
• SMART Recovery
• The Five Stages of Addiction Recovery
• The Neuroscience of Addiction Recovery
• The Role of Family in Addiction Recovery
• The Truth About Dopamine After Alcohol Addiction Recovery
• What’s the Difference Between Sobriety & Recovery?

Relapse

• Creating a Relapse Prevention Plan
• Relapse Doesn’t Mean You’ve Failed
• Relapse is Part of Recovery
• Relapse Prevention and the Five Rules of Recovery
• Relapse Prevention, Addiction Triggers (Recovery Strategies)
• The Four Essentials of Relapse Prevention
• The Three Stages of Relapse
• What is Relapse & What is it Not?
• What is the Difference Between a Slip and Relapse?
• What To Do After a Relapse

The Science Behind Addiction

• 2-Minute Neuroscience: The Reward System
• Addiction and Brain Reward and Anti-Reward Pathways
• Addiction Explained, Rises & Falls in Dopamine
• Addiction Neuroscience 101
• Dopamine and Addiction: Separating Myths and Facts
• Dopamine System, Craving & Pursuit Explained
• Drugs, Brains, and Behavior
• How an Addicted Brain Works
• Introduction to the Reward Pathway
• Reward Circuitry in Addiction
• Serotonin vs. Dopamine – 7 Key Differences Between Pleasure and Happiness
• The Neurobiology of Drug Addiction (NIDA, 2007) [PDF]
• The Neuroscience of Drug Reward and Addiction