Addiction

During the 2022 publicity tour for Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, a musical biopic about the career of the famous American pop music satirist, actor Daniel Radcliffe revisited parts of his life when he was struggling to recover from alcoholism in 2010. Radcliffe began drinking heavily as a way to deal with the pressures of fame and growing up in the public eye as the

In pharmaceutical research, substances that affect the mind or behavior are defined as psychoactive. This definition extends to substances that alter perception, mood, consciousness, or cognition. Then you have psychotropic substances, which are also psychoactive but are mostly used to treat mental health conditions. Psychoactives can range from tobacco and coffee to liquor and methamphetamine. Psychotropics may include antidepressants such as Prozac, antipsychotics like Haldol,

All psychoactive substances have the potential to affect normal physical activity to a certain degree. Impairment is a hallmark of drinking too much. Many people who drink at nightclubs call it a night when they’re too drunk to be on the dance floor. With opiates, the impairment is different in the sense that it forces your breathing and heart rate to slow down, thus hindering

In March 2023, during a guest appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, rapper Macklemore spoke about his struggles with relapse at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which kept many people in recovery from attending meetings at Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs. For the 39-year-old musician, it was the second relapse since he had begun his journey to recovery four years before

In February 2024, former NBA star Rex Chapman went on a publicity tour to promote It’s Hard for Me to Live with Me, an autobiography some book critics describe as a hard-hitting addiction memoir. Chapman started his career with the Charlotte Hornets, and he spent the 1990s as an explosive shooting guard with three other teams. His final seasons with the Phoenix Suns were underscored

In November 2023, two developments in the world of Hollywood celebrities dealing with the stigma of alcoholism made news headlines. Actress Jessica Simpson celebrated six years of sobriety with an Instagram post that discussed how she felt labeled and stigmatized by many people, from fans to business associates and relatives.  During the same week, mental health researchers published articles praising the work of the late Friends

Neurochemistry is a scientific field often compared to quantum physics in the sense that both generate prodigious quantities of research, but the steady flow of findings often raises more questions instead of providing absolute answers. Both fields focus on mysterious particles we can barely measure in the nanometer range. While quantum researchers scratch their heads at the complexity of the Higgs boson that somehow creates

In August 2023, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published the results of a longitudinal survey on alcohol use disorder (AUD) statistics compiled from 1999 to 2020. By evaluating information managed within the Wide-Ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (WONDER) database, CDC researchers noticed the AUD gender gap is narrowing, but males still account for 58% of individuals who went through recovery, and

In the 2018 film Beautiful Boy, which is based on two poignant memoirs written by a methamphetamine addict and his father, actor Timothée Chalamet plays the role of Nic Sheff, a best-selling writer whose life now revolves around promoting mental health awareness among young people. Beautiful Boy is a heartbreaking film that ends with an uplifting title card featuring a message Sheff always mentions when

When evaluating the various therapeutic strategies for the treatment of substance abuse disorders, there’s a strong need to shift the outdated narratives of addiction as a choice or character flaw. These incorrect perceptions only succeed in creating harmful stereotypes that ignore human nature, particularly in the context of neurochemistry. Early Neurochemical Processes of Addiction Learned experiences, cultural factors, and behavioral patterns aren’t the sole foundations of addiction.