Addiction Treatment Blog

Learning from Burnout: Developing Sustainable Leaders and Avoiding Career Derailment

We were inspired to write our book, ‘Learning from burnout: developing sustainable leaders and avoiding career derailment’ for reasons of personal biography as well as professional practice. The former concern one of us burning out in their early thirties while working as a human resources executive for an IT company; the latter relates to our consultancy work with organisations helping them manage and develop their leadership talent. We noticed an increasing trend among this population towards action addicted, adrenalized working lives and what appeared to be – based on the number who were burning out – unsustainable approaches to the pursuit of career. At the same time we recognised that organisations were becoming increasingly more demanding and absorptive, and as a consequence, work and workplaces increasingly more all consuming. Like the high speed internet connections that serve our offices and our homes, work seemed to be always on. It had become a seven day a week preoccupation which was always there, brought into every facet of human life through the wonders of the Blackberry and the mobile phone. Work, it seemed, never slept, and those enslaved to it were sleeping a great deal less than they used to.

Burnout was the inevitable consequence of this heady combination of addictive behaviour and organisational greediness, or so it seemed to us. But when we referred to the literature on burnout we discovered that the leading authorities in the field believed burnout was largely caused by organisations, rather than both the organisation and those who work for them. We thought this rather odd. It did not resonate with our own experience of burnout, or with what we were seeing among the high achievers with whom we were working.

In addition, the self help industry’s claims that burnout can occur to anyone has devalued its meaning as a serious psychological condition. Apparently you are equally vulnerable to burnout whether you’re an over-stressed baby boomer, in a bad marriage, having a mid life crisis or a female indoor sex worker. As a result, the term has – to all intents and purposes – become meaningless. Read more…

Stephen Fry

Whether you are cheerfully anonymous, gloomily famous or unhappily infamous, there are pages in this book that have something for you. There is nothing po-faced, earnest or phoney in what you are about to read. What you will find is honesty, humour, insight and help.

We all know the ineluctable law of gravity as it applies on this earth. Most of us who have experimented with such things know the equally ineluctable law that dominates the life of the drug user, drunk or chocoholic – the law that states ‘there is no such thing as a free buzz‘. In other words, that every high will be followed by an equal (or greater) low – the downer, the hangover the blood sugar crash. It seems that inside the human brain the same relentless, capricious and damnable laws insist on operating. What goes up must always come down.

Many of us who have been diagnosed as bipolar find the manic half of the equation beguiling in the freedom, expansiveness, energy and optimism it brings. We are kings of the world, nothing is beyond us, society is too slow for our racing minds, everything is connected in a web of glorious colour, creativity and meaning. We find too that the inevitable descent matches each characteristic with devastating exactness. What was light is now dark, what was coloured is now grey; the optimism is replaced with pessimism, the self-belief with self-contempt, the energy with sloth, the expansiveness with suffocating constriction. The cruel precision of this reminds one of all Manichean oppositions in myth and legend, from Zoroastrianism to Darth Wader: ‘If you only knew the power of the Dark Side.‘ Well, we manic depressives do know the power of the Dark Side. Read more…

Most of the history comes from “Slaying the Dragon“, an excellent book written by William White on the history of addiction and it’s treatment. In 1873, Dr. Charles Hewitt of the Minnesota Board of Health called on the State of Minnesota to declare that “inebriation is a disease; that it demands the same public facilities for it’s treatment as other diseases.” (p. 199) And there it stood for many years. Many hospitals for the care of the “inebriate” were erected. After the turn of 20th century, the idea of a disease was actually lost a bit in the furor of prohibition. A few physicians still treated the illness, and some of them were helpful to the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. In 1937, a group called the Research Council on Problems of Alcohol was founded that proposed research on alcoholism as a disease comparable to “tuberculosis, poliomyelitis, caner, and other major diseases.” In 1956, the American Medical Association (AMA) established a committee on alcoholism and stated that alcoholism is “an illness which should have the attention of a physician.”

So you can see that the idea of addiction is a disease is not a new one. Even as medical professionals learned in school that addiction is a treatable disease, many didn’t believe it. They couldn’t see it under the microscope or dissect it in anatomy lab. If there isn’t a test for it, it doesn’t exist. So for many doctors the time of realization is still happening.

The above article was taken from Howard Westman (MD)’s book of Question and Answers (QAA) on Addiction.

If you are suffering from an addiction problem, please contact us on +44 (0)207 100 7260 and one of our experienced psychiatrists will help you.

I have been sober, clean and abstinent for two years and one month now. Without doubt these have been the best years of my life. I no longer drink alcohol, take drugs, eat white flour or sugar, and I no longer purge myself bulimically. If this sounds pretty drastic – and it is – well, it had to be. By 28 July 1990 I was in a terrible mess. Riddled with addictions, I was obese, miserable, suicidal and beaten. Until then I thought that I could cure myself of all my troubles. I knew I had major problems and I could not stay clean or sober for any length of time. Everything I did was ‘on my own terms’. That is, I frowned on people who went to therapy, had treatments or consulted psychologists. It was, in my opinion, a sign of total weakness. ‘Can’t they get themselves together without all that?’ I used to think.

The level of denial and false pride within me was enormous. As I refused all offers of help I slid further and further into the abyss. Hell on earth. So what happened?

I fell in love with someone who wanted to get help for their own addictions. They went to treatment and I visited them. I freaked out there, and got very angry. I fled back to England and locked myself away for two weeks. However, I knew that this person was trying to tell me something, and I knew that it was: if I didn’t act quickly I was going to die. It was that simple. I went to visit my friend again, and we had a brutal confrontation. This time I was ready to listen, and I decided to seek help for myself.

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Principal Drugs

An increasing problem of current therapy is patient compliance with prescribed treatment. It is easy for a doctor to prescribe, but to ensure that the patient takes the prescribed drugs in the right dose is a very different matter. The magnitude of the problem has increased with the rise in multiple therapy, and the reluctance on the part of some doctors to prescribe mixed products so that the number of different tables or capsules to be taken daily can be reduced. It must be admitted that relatively few patients leave the consulting room with a clear idea of the nature and dose of the prescribed medication, partly as a result of fear of the doctor, and partly because of the difficulties of understanding complex therapy. Here, nurses can play a valuable part in reducing difficulties and misunderstandings, particularly when dealing with the elderly and/or confused patient, and it is often helpful to ask patients to repeat the directions that they believe they have been given. Misunderstandings and errors can be cleared up at an early stage. The containers of the dispensed medicines should bear not only the name of drug, but also useful additional information such as ‘The Heart Tablets‘ or ‘The Water Tablets‘. Vague directions should be avoided: whenever possible definite times for administration of drugs should be arranged. Such timing can be linked with some regular activity, such as a meal time, or a favourite TV programme may be used as a memory aid for regular dosing. With multiple therapy, patients should be encouraged to set each day’s dose aside, so that a double dose of a drug will not be taken by forgetfulness. Patients should be advised that the occasional missed dose is not always important, and a missed dose should not be made up by taking a double dose later on.

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Psychiatric Drugs Explained

The revised edition of this highly-respected book builds on the success of the first edition with enhanced coverage of current issues and developments in psychotropic drug use, in both hospital and community settings. Using clear language, Psychiatric Drugs Explained explores the effects, benefits and side effects of psychotropic drugs and the impact these can have on person’s life. It will be an essential guide for those involved in the care of people following psychotropic drug regimens.

Organised by condition, the management of schizophrenia, depression, mania, obsessive compulsive disorders, anxiety, insomnia, cognitive impairement and sexual difficulties are all considered. The major drug categories are listed and the clinical uses, modes of action and side effects of principal drugs in each category are described. Issues such as consent to treatment, liability for side effects and dependence on psychotropic drugs are also discussed.

Psychiatric Drugs Explained will allow both clients and those advising them to be better informed when considering available treatment options. It is an essential handbook for psychiatric nurses (hospital and community), student nurses (including Project 2000), GPs, social workers and psychiatrists. Read more…