In Iceland, teenage smoking, drinking and drug use have been radically cut in the past 20 years. Emma Young finds out how they did it, and why other countries won’t follow suit. Listen to or download an audiobook of this story on SoundCloud and iTunes. It’s a little before three on a sunny Friday afternoon and Laugardalur Park, …
Category: Addiction
Apr 25
Do Genes Make People Crazy?
The invention of the telescope in the early 1600s led to discoveries that soon disrupted and crashed centuries of belief about the earth, the sun, and the planets. Something similar is happening in genetics, and in particular the genetics of psychological and psychiatric disorders. The new telescope is genome sequencing. For the first time, genome sequencing technology lets …
Aug 20
What to do about drunk lawyers
That lawyers have a drinking problem hardly comes as a shock. Just go to Netflix and pull down any movie or TV serial about lawyers. In the entertainment world, the expression “drunk lawyer” is almost as redundant as “lying politician” or “cheating husband.” So it wasn’t a stop-press moment when Patrick Krill told an audience …
Jul 20
Swedish translation published
A Swedish translation of my book Empowering Your Sober Self has been published by LifeRing Sweden, www.lifering.se. The translation was prepared by Project LifeRing run by Skyddsvärnet, a nonprofit social development organization, with funding from the Heritage Fund. Sophia Olsson, project manager for Project LifeRing, acted as editor and Inger Bodal of City Text is the …
Nov 03
Time for new approaches in addiction treatment
Addiction and its consequences have driven up the death rate among middle aged working-class white people to unprecedented levels, a study published yesterday by the National Academy of Sciences reported. While death rates among nonwhites and among all other age brackets have been falling, mortality among whites in the 45 to 54 year age group …
Jul 26
New Edition, New Publishing
One of the rewards of my retirement is the time to get to long-postponed projects. Other than dropping 30 lbs and getting ripped abs, the longest-postponed project in my life has been updating How Was Your Week, the LifeRing convenor handbook. How Was Your Week came out originally in 2003, at a time when LifeRing …
Jan 23
My Updated Audiobook Now On Sale
It took a lot of stumbles on my part and a heap of patience on the part of the professionals at ACX, the Audiobook Exchange, but the second audiobook edition of my book Empowering Your Sober Self is now up and available. This edition updates my perspective on the LifeRing pathway to addiction recovery. The original …