Breaking Free

Vegetarian Times, Jan, 2001 by Jane Mersky Leder

Reclaiming your life after an addiction involves more than just willpower. It means healing on the physical, mental and spiritual levels

After both her parents died of cancer just two years apart, Jean Olsen went into an emotional tailspin. To ease her troubled sleep, the 40-something nurse from Tennessee started taking Vicodin, a narcotic analgesic she found in her mother's medicine cabinet. When the prescription ran out, Olsen began stealing Vicodin from the hospital where she worked.

She also started helping herself to the prescription narcotic Stadol after an old migraine problem flared up. The drug not only relieved Olsen's pain but made her feel euphoric, and it enhanced her sexual pleasure. Within a year, she was addicted to both drugs. After being fired from her job for stealing drugs, Olsen checked herself into an inpatient detoxification program, though she still wouldn't admit to having an addiction. She also sought treatment at a group apartment for addicts and an outpatient program, where she admitted to being an addict for the first time. Yet neither of those approaches worked. In the midst of everything, she became clinically depressed. Only after being treated by a doctor who specializes in addiction and attending daily Narcotics Anonymous meetings was Olsen, now 54, finally able to conquer her addiction.

For Carol O'Hare, 44, the road from a gambling addiction to recovery took a different route. Her problem began more than a decade ago, when she was a newly divorced mother of three with no job skills. To relieve stress, the Las Vegas resident started playing video poker and was soon hitting the casinos every night. O'Hare's gambling addiction bled her dry: She lost her children's savings bonds, a lot of borrowed money and her peace of mind. Physically ill and emotionally depressed, she shared her problem with a friend, who recommended Gamblers Anonymous. The meetings made O'Hare realize there is no magical cure for her addiction. "For me, it was crucial to learn what I was going through wasn't a moral issue but a mental health problem," she says. O'Hare has not only recovered but now helps others fight addiction as the executive vice president of the National Council on Problem Gambling.

Mary Sonntag, a 41-year-old New York City resident, also overcame a behavioral addiction, one that developed during her senior year in college. Her battle with eating disorders started when the 5-foot-3-inch, 120-pound student forced herself to throw up, or purge, because she felt too full after a meal. The incident mushroomed into an obsessive pattern of dieting and exercising. A year later, Sonntag weighed 78 pounds and was eating only eight corn nuts a day.

Sonntag was diagnosed as anorexic and bulimic. She was hospitalized three times in the next decade but continued her self-destructive behavior. Therapists rewarded Sonntag when she gained weight and "punished" her with hospital time when she didn't. That treatment didn't work; neither did counseling sessions or attending Overeaters Anonymous meetings. A desperate Sonntag eventually found a lasting cure at a private addiction facility that integrated conventional approaches with alternative treatments like yoga and acupuncture. Today, she's a psychotherapist specializing in eating addictions.

The Nature of the Beast

Sonntag, O'Hare and Olsen are hard-working, well-intentioned women whose addictions ultimately got the best of them. Like millions of Americans, they discovered that the substance or behavior that initially provided solace eventually had become a source of misery. They paid a heavy price for their addictions, chiefly an emotional and physical dependence, as well as the financial strain of feeding it. Beyond the havoc it wreaks on people's lives, addiction also carries with it a persistent social stigma--in spite of the new scientific understanding of the brain's role in addictive problems. To many, chemical dependence or behavioral disorders are still perceived as moral or even criminal deviances. "Prejudice against addicts as weak-willed people who can kick their addictions if only they would try remains embedded in the public consciousness," says Sheldon Miller, M.D., a psychiatry professor at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Physicians also tend to treat addiction as an acute condition rather than adopting the more cutting-edge view of it as a chronic problem like arthritis or hypertension (i.e., it can be controlled but not cured). "It's really a day-to-day struggle for many people, and some of them require long-term care," says Diana DiNitto, Ph.D., a professor of social work at the University of Texas-Austin. In fact, she says, the emphasis of addiction treatment has shifted from intensive, 30-day detoxification programs to long-term outpatient care focused on preventing relapses.

Despite the persistent stereotypes, researchers have made ground-breaking progress in their understanding of its causes and consequences. Substance addiction is now considered a brain disease that fundamentally alters the way the organ processes and communicates information. And although it has yet to be clinically proven, researchers suspect the same principle is at work with behavioral addictions like eating disorders and gambling. Yet addiction doesn't always manifest as ardent drug addiction or alcoholism. It can also be about eating disorders based on a poor self-image or an obsessive concern with weight control. This knowledge can help many of us, even those who don't think of ourselves as addicts but do acknowledge our lack of control over food.