by Jackie Hammers-Crowell | Jul 13, 2020 | Addiction, Mental Health
It is not uncommon for people with mental illnesses to use substances to self-medicate, or for people to manifest or exacerbate a mental illness for the first time after using alcohol or other drugs. Regardless of which condition arrived first, when a person suffers...
by Jackie Hammers-Crowell | Jun 18, 2020 | Addiction
My daughter loves her grandma’s stories. Sometimes grandma will talk about her deceased husband. I never had the opportunity to meet my father-in-law. Alcohol stole his life before I met my husband. After hearing her grandma’s stories, my daughter, who was only 5...
by Jackie Hammers-Crowell | May 25, 2020 | Addiction, Alcoholism
There is a tendency in my mother’s family to blame everything on her father. He was a violent, angry man, whose entire adult life revolved around alcohol. My mother and her siblings blamed him for the family’s poverty, for several of them being raised in foster care,...
by Jackie Hammers-Crowell | May 11, 2020 | Addiction, Recovery
There is no chronic disease with a zero percent relapse rate. Whether you’re talking about diabetes, asthma, high blood pressure or addiction, the people who struggle with these afflictions may have an occasional slip or even a huge setback after they’ve found...
by Jackie Hammers-Crowell | Apr 1, 2020 | Addiction
While there is never a “safe” time to use illicit drugs, being exposed to a contagious disease can make it especially dangerous for a person to be in active addiction. There are a number of factors that could put people who use drugs in increased danger from...
by Jackie Hammers-Crowell | Mar 5, 2020 | Addiction, Recovery
It can be difficult for families to know how to proceed when one among them has struggled with addiction and is in the early stages of recovery. Family members tend to either avoid the person or cut them too much slack. A Happy Medium Both of these rather extreme...
