Addiction Treatment Blog

In 1954, Olds and Milner discovered that there appeared to be pleasure spots in the brain. Implanting electrodes in certain areas of the brain, through which a rat can give itself an electric current by pressing on a lever, produced in most brain areas nothing of note. In some areas, however, the rats seemed keen on the effects of self-stimulation and, in some cases, if left to their own devices would self-stimulate to the exclusion of all else – even food and drink.

As mentioned, noradrenaline was discovered in the brain in 1954. In 1959, a second catecolamine, dopamine, was identified, which was shown to be deficient in Parkinson’s disease.

The later mapping of dopamine-containing neurones has shown that they too, like noradrenergic neurones, tend to originate in a discrete area, the ventral tegmentum. Some of these neurones run to strictly motor areas of the brain and constitute the nigrostriatal system, and it is loss of nerve calls in this pathway that leads to Parkinson’s disease. Read more…

If the induction of appetites and cravings, which has been hitherto seen as psychological dependence, is not in fact any more psychological than the physical dependence that underlies withdrawal, is there any other psychology involved? There almost certainly is (1). For example LSD, phencyclidine and many of the new designer drugs do not cause either type 1 or 2 physical dependence. Yet they are increasingly abused, despite evidence that many of these compounds may be fatal. Phencyclidine, for example, has led to a considerable number of fatalities and, despite not leading to any obvious euphoria, during the 1980s became for a period the second most common drug of abuse in the USA. Why?

Common to many of these drugs is the fact that they alter consciousness and, as a result, are interesting to take. On tis basis, one explanation that may account psychedelics, opiates or alcohol, there is a certain amount of playful activity. Read more…

Watching your daily drinking limits carefully will be beneficial to you in longer term.

All estimates of the total number of problem drinkers tend, by their nature, to be conservative. However, some statistics are very useful for statutory bodies.

The total cost to the NHS of alcohol related problems (ARPs) was £149.35 million in 1990. £26.51 million went into in-patient mental health units, while £109.41 million went into other forms of psychiatric intervention for ARPs. It is estimated that 200,000 life-years are lost per year due to alcohol related problems, with an overall cost to the nation of approximately £2.5 billion.

It is currently estimated that each health district has, on average, 43,000 people who currently drink more than the recommended sensible limit. Approximately 13,750 problem drinkers in each district are presently in contact with the caring professions as a consequence of their alcohol misuse. Read more…

Home Detox has many advantages compared to clinical detox on alcohol addiction.

The term ‘detoxification‘ can be applied in several ways. It can be used to imply a ‘process’ whereby a substance leaves the body, ie removal of alcohol or a poison; or it can refer to an ‘action’. ie a treatment which entails subjecting onself or another person to a ‘process’.

Within the caring professions, alcohol detoxification is largely recognized as a treatment. What follows aims to examine and explain this method of treatment.

Dr. Tim Stockwell developed the currently recognized model for home detoxification, which he defined as:

a treatment designed to control both medical and psychological complications which may occur temporarily after a period of heavy and sustained alcohol use.

This blog will use Dr. Stockwell’s model throughout.

Withdrawal from even small amounts of alcohol consumption will have physical effects as the substance decreases within the body. These may be relatively minor, such as sensitivity to light, irritability or thirst. Only a small proportion of people with alcohol related problems will have withdrawal symptoms that are so severe that they risk experiencing delirium tremens (DTs) or convulsions. Read more…

If we heard it said of Orientals that they habitually
drank a liquor which went to their heads, deprived
them of reason and made them vomit, we should
say: ‘How very barbarous!’

Jean de la Bruyere (1645-96), ‘Les Caracteres’.

In 1994, the UK spent nearly £12 billion on alcohol.

History of Alcohol

Alcohol has been available to man for several thousand years. Ethyl alcohol, or ethanol, is produced by the action of yeasts on sugars found in fruit and other plant material. Compared with most other substances of abuse it has a very simple chemical structure. One tends to assume that it was one of the first intoxicants used by man because it is so easy to make. However most of the fruits grown today have been selected for their high sugar content and so the manufacture of fruit wines is a relatively simple process. This was no so in prehistoric times, when sugar-rich plants and sugars themselves were rare. Therefore other plant-derived psychotropic substances that could simply be eaten without preparation probably pre-date alcohol. The first cultures to produce alcohol are thought to have been based in the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. During the 4th millennium BC they probably fermented dates. The warm climate and the high sugar content of the dates were ideal for the purpose. As the process spread, a whole range of naturally occurring substances were used to produce alcoholic drinks.

The discovery of distillation enabled early civilisations to make more concentrated alcoholic drinks. This process was probably discovered independently by several ancient societies. Concentrating the active constituent in this way enabled the alcohol to act as a preservative and beverages could be stored for longer. In Britain, the strength of alcohol-containing drinks was traditionally measured in terms of ‘percentage proof‘; 100 percent proof was equal to 57.1 per cent ethanol by volume. However, it is now the standard practice to state alcohol content in terms of percentage by volume and to refer to the content of individual drinks in terms of ‘units’. Read more…

Alcoholism is not only dangerous to your life, but harms others around you.

Alcoholism is the continued abuse of alcohol regardless of the detrimental consequences to the health of mind or body.

A more popular definition might allude to Jekyll and Hyde, where somebody’s personality profoundly changes for the worse as a result of drinking alcohol.

Alcohol is believed to cause around 33,000 deaths per year in Britain. The most common ways to die through alcoholism are:

• Impaired judgement and decision-making process, often resulting in fatal accidents at work and while driving.
• Cirrhosis of the liver.
• Choking to death on one’s own vomit.
• Cancer.
• Atrophy of the brain.

Statistics About Alcoholism

• One in four admissions to hospital in the UK is alcohol related.
• Sixty per cent of British suicides are alcohol related.
• Alcohol is implicated in forty per cent of domestic violence cases and thirty-nine per cent of fires.
• It is an illness that affects the body and mind, is compulsive in nature and considered to be an addiction. It was first reported by Senecca in ancient Rome as something very close to insanity. The Italian for alcoholic is alcoolisto; the French is alcoholique and the German is alkoholiker. Read more…

Back in 1987, a researcher named Cloninger proposed a classification of two types of alcoholism. With great imagination, he named them as Type I and Type II. Anyway, he said that Type I represented the majority of alcoholics and that it was characterized by four things:

1. Late onset (after age 25)
2. Low degree of spontaneous alcohol seeking
3. Psychological dependence coupled with guilt and fear
4. And a low degree of novelty seeking and a high degree of harm avoidance.

That was a pretty astute observation, and, of course, Type II alcoholism was just the reverse: early onset, novelty seeking, and a lot of spontaneous alcohol seeking and not much guilt or fear. What Cloninger didn’t know about back in 1987 was the dopamine reward system of the Medial Forebrain Bundle. If you take a look at these types through the dopamine system, what you see is what you would expect to see from people who had too much dopamine (type I) and too little dopamine (type II). To understand these types better we have to leave humans for a bit and head off with some rat researchers.

It turns out that rats, regular rats that is, don’t really like drinking alcohol. It burns. So to get a rat in a lab to drink alcohol, you have to do what the liquor industry did for my generation; you have to make a wine cooler. You add sugar to the alcohol, and the rats liking for sugar overcomes its dislike for alcohol and it eventually will drink the stuff.

So you start by adding a little sugar and a few of the rats will drink it. As you add more and more sugar, more and more rats will start drinking. Eventually you’ll add enough sugar so that only the very few rats that are most averse to alcohol will not have started drinking. If you line these rats up in the order they started drinking, you get the scientific bell shaped curve (see below). Now you take the rats on the right of the curve (they like alcohol the least) and mate the males and females together. You do the same for the rats on the left of the curve (they dislike alcohol the least). Now you have two new sets of rats — those descended from the left hand of the curve and those descended from the right hand side of the curve. With each of those two groups you do the same experiment, each time taking the extreme right or left and mating them together to make yet another group. So in each generation you get a bell shaped curve, but the curves get farther and farther apart. After about 14 or 15 generations you now have two new strains of rats.

Example of a Bell Shaped Curve

Those rats descended from the right hand side of the right don’t like alcohol at all. They won’t self administer drugs. They just don’t see the point. The rats descended from the left hand side of the curve are very different. They’ll drink straight lab alcohol with no sugar. They love self administering drugs. 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.

Read more…