Time To Rethink Addiction

There is new help for the addicted and for their loved ones

- Lisa Fields

When Hollywood actress Claudia Christian was in her twenties, she had an unremarkable relationship with alcohol. By her late thirties, however, she was drinking too much and had become fixated on alcohol, craving it even when she abstained for months at a time. She tried Alcoholics Anonymous, psychotherapy, hypnotherapy and inpatient rehab centres, but nothing helped.

“My parents didn’t know what to do,” Christian says. “I got constantly bombarded with ‘Why can’t you just stop?’ Nobody could understand [that I was] being consumed by a compulsive disorder.”

While her family judged her and many friends abandoned her, Christian’s best friend, Holly Evans, remained supportive.

“She was basically just trying to hide it all the time,” Evans says. “Sometimes she wanted me to be like a policeman, and I was—then in the glove compartment, [I’d find] a bottle of something. [And] I thought, Well, maybe there’s something I can do to fix the situation. [But] nothing that I did worked.”

There are currently 32 million Europeans with alcohol dependence, 1.3 million high-risk opioid users, and millions more use cocaine, marijuana and other illicit substances. About 1.2 million people in the EU received treatment for illicit drug use in 2017. Much of that treatment relied upon traditional programmes such as AA.

But the time to rely on decades-old models is over. Today, newer, research-proven treatments are available, offering more, and more effective, help for the addicted and their family members and friends.