The Coleman Institute Blog

Here’s the scenario: Your coworker is exhibiting uncharacteristic behavior at work and you are concerned it may possibly be an addiction problem. It could be to alcohol, prescription or nonprescription drugs or even a behavioral addiction to gaming, gambling or sex. What should you do?

Phillipa has been part of our practice for many years. She has as tough an Addiction Story as any I’ve heard. From getting a taste of hydrocodone as a teenager, she moved on to oxycodone, and finally to a fierce heroin habit which lasted for many years.

Choosing nursing or medicine as a profession usually means that sometime in your career, you’ll be working weekends and holidays. So when my children were young, I had to take my turns doing shifts on Thanksgiving, Christmas, Memorial Day, or the 4th of July for many years.

Is the Opioid Crisis responsible for helping to mobilize some of the greatest new approaches to help people change? Or have these great techniques been brewing under the surface, being applied to different problems and issues, highlighted now because of the vast numbers affected by opioid addiction?

I’m not sure about this chicken and egg story, but I do know that the very numbers of people affected have helped to motivate people from parents to medical and counseling professionals to volunteers, to understand what is the best way to help their loved ones, friends, or patients stay alive, number one, and flourish in their life, number two.

As I tell my patients all the time: you didn’t use drugs because you were ignorant, you used drugs because they were helping you with something. Until they weren’t.