Nice documentary - I have a lot of respect for the man Russell Brand is becoming.

Russell Brand: From Addiction to Recovery

Cannabis, booze, acid, speed, coke, crack, heroin... Russell took drugs every single day. At one point he started being afraid of the fact that he might die. He was told that if he continues like that, in six month time, he's going to be dead, in prison, or in an asylum. He got clean at the age of 27, the age Amy Winehouse was when she died. Amy's death was a paradoxical, unsurprising shock, and Russell felt like he could have done something to help.

That's why he made this film, to have a sympathetic look at alcoholism and addiction, a condition that the World Health Organization regards as a disorder. He reckons that drugs and alcoholism are much misunderstood by users, non-users, and the government. He thinks that we need to start regarding addiction in all its forms as a health issue as opposed to the judicial and criminal issue. In this film he wants to learn more and see if we can do things differently.

Brand meets a whole range of people from whom he draws insights - scientists at the cutting edge of research into the psychology of addiction, those involved in innovative recovery treatments and drug addicts themselves. 

Is addiction a disease? Should it be criminalized? And is abstinence-based recovery, which worked for Brand, a possible way forward? In this documentary Brand challenges conventional theory and practice as well as government policy in his own inimitable style, confronting the reality of addiction head on. 

Along the way he draws on his own experience to try to help one of the addicts he meets to take the first steps towards recovery. Armed with his own heartfelt beliefs and new insights gained during his journey, Brand has the opportunity to change the hearts and minds of policy makers when he is invited to give evidence before the Home Affairs Select Committee investigating the efficacy of current drug addiction treatment in the UK. - BBC Three.

Watch the full documentary now - 60 min

Joseph Gelfer - The Teetotal Consciousness Shift

I resonate pretty strongly with this post from Joseph Gelfer over at the Good Men Project. I used to enjoy alcohol, a lot. Moderation was not in my vocabulary - if three drinks felt good, then six would feel better, and then 12 would feel better than that. Unfortunately, I could do this without appearing to be out of control (my father was a dry drunk by the time I was born, but if there is a genetic component, I had it).

By the time I turned 30, and celebrated with a 3-day weekend I still don't remember, it was time to stop. Stopping seemed inconceivable, however. Alcohol was how I socialized; alcohol was my sleep aid; alcohol was the fuel to my writing; alcohol was a central part of my life.

But I did stop.

Aside from a few periods of deep depression, I have not had more than a drink or two in a sitting, and at this point it's often months between beers or glasses of wine - and then only with dinner on a night out.

I drank to self-medicate my social anxiety, my insecurities, my lack of self-awareness. I drank to be numb. When I stopped, there was no physical withdrawal, but there was a lot of psychological turmoil as I began to learn how to feel my feelings, to regulate my affect, to sit with the discomfort of my inner critic and my wounded inner children.

I credit Buddhism and therapy with giving me the tools and the inspiration to stop drinking. I credit sobriety with the ability to feel empathy and compassion for others, which started with feeling it for myself.

The Teetotal Consciousness Shift

MARCH 2, 2013
BY JOSEPH GELFER

Joseph Gelfer found that when he became a teetotaler, he became genuinely free to be who he wanted to be.

I used to enjoy alcohol, a lot. I was never one for moderation. I knew it was not really sustainable health-wise, but found it very difficult to imagine a life without booze: giving up right now rather than some hypothetical point in the future felt a bit like moving to Mars. From the age of 18 I had a maximum of five days off in a row without alcohol and this occurrence required being half way up the Himalayas. I managed to wind down the consumption in my early thirties to three days off, four days on, but four days on when you’re not so great at moderation is still not so good. I loved booze, but also resented being somewhat beholden to it, which for someone with delusions of superhuman grandeur felt like a significant compromise to my sense of self.

I found arguments about health, relationships and wasted money uncompelling as a path to giving up: not even having children and wanting to be better for them made a difference. Ultimately, for me, the path away from alcohol was a thinking exercise, which has lead me to believe that most problematic relationships with substances of any kind are not physical, rather existential.

The Lightbulb Moment

I came to this realization during a time when I was feeling rather sorry for myself. In particular, I had allowed myself to resent my domestic circumstances of being married with children and a mortgage. I felt that I should really be out doing wild and interesting things: instead of being at home watching TV I should be deep in the Amazon guzzling psychedelic brews with shamans. Then I started to unpack the constituent parts of that desire and concluded that what I really wanted was not something exotic, rather something extreme. I wanted to get out of my mind, which actually meant wanting to get out of my status quo consciousness.

I then asked myself, what was the most extreme thing I could do as a person that had been drinking alcohol for every week of his adult life? The answer, of course, is extreme sobriety. I framed this as the ultimate shift in consciousness: this was a trip from which you did not come down or return home; this was a trip that kept going forever.

Recalibration

On the evening of 6 December 2009 I sat with a glass of cheap red wine and decided that the next day was the beginning of the New Order. The first week was something of a challenge, inasmuch as it felt like a clock-watching exercise, chalking up days which were all populated with analysis of the exercise and the viability of its longevity. By the second week I was in unchartered territory (remember the previous five day record?) and this brought a certain amount of renewed energy. In the third week a tangible sense of grief set in. I knew by this point that there was indeed life after booze, but it didn’t look very appealing. I felt that the drinking me had died, and this brought with it a feeling of significant loss. The question then became: was it worth it?

I won’t lie to you, this sense of grief lasted for months. Whenever it was one of my historical on-days (Thursday-Sunday) I would think wistfully of the old times; whenever I walked by a bar and saw people enjoying themselves I had a pang of envy. But slowly that sense of grief began to recede. At some point I realized I was going for a day or more without the idea of alcohol even crossing my mind. And then some breakthrough moments occurred.

One of the things I used to enjoy about alcohol was that it felt like coming home. Whether in a foreign city or in my front room, having a drink brought a certain sense of union, a bit like Neo seeing the code. But once the recalibration phase had completed I began to get those moments of union quite randomly: on the train to work, strolling down the high street, sitting in a cafe. Indeed, one day it occurred to me that both qualitatively and quantitatively I was experiencing a greater sense of union than ever before.

Evangelization

One of the things that happens when you don’t drink is that everyone demands to know why when you turn down alcohol past 6pm. It’s possible to dance around the subject with excuses such as “I’m driving” or “just having a week off.” But I like to gently confront people with the truth stating with a smile, “I don’t drink: I’m not so good at moderation.” I initially thought this would make people feel uncomfortable, but it usually does the opposite. I have lost count of the amount of times people have launched into a story about their own troubles with moderation. I then usually tell them about the “thinking exercise” that brought us to the conversation at hand, and that is the only excuse they need to identify the existential issue that is causing those troubles.

In short, most people are drinking because they are petrified of being alone with their dreams and anxieties, as confronting both would often require a radical change in perspective and lifestyle. Indeed, it’s easy to become rather conspiratorial about all this and to start thinking that the reason why alcohol is so ubiquitous in society (a fact that becomes even more explicit after recalibration) is precisely so that people stay away from this realization, as addressing it usually requires unhooking oneself from many of the things that keep mainstream society operating in the way that it does. Indeed, I find that being teetotal can easily be framed as a significant countercultural gesture.

I therefore find it paradoxical when I see people consuming alcohol (and drugs) in the cause of freedom because I am left with the suspicion that such consumption is doing precisely the opposite. Do not hear me say here that people should stop consuming alcohol or taking drugs, but I would urge everyone to have a serious think about the true nature of freedom within the context of such consumption, and the many different shades of conformity and regulation.

Only men? It seems so in this study. We know that alcohol abuse over several years contributes to alexithymia (lacking recognition of and verbal skills related to emotions), which makes it difficult to "read" and understand other people's emotions. "While alcoholic subjects seem to be able to correctly recognize emotions like joy and disgust, they show a tendency to overestimate anger and other negative emotions like fear and sadness.""

Full Citation:
Simona Amenta, Xavier Noël, Paul Verbanck, Salvatore Campanella. Decoding of Emotional Components in Complex Communicative Situations (Irony) and Its Relation to Empathic Abilities in Male Chronic Alcoholics: An Issue for Treatment. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 2012; DOI: 10.1111/j.1530-0277.2012.01909.x

Alcoholic Men Demonstrate a Deficit in Empathy and Distorted View of Irony

ScienceDaily (Nov. 8, 2012) — Emotions are often implicit undertones to our communication interactions, and decoding them requires substantial social and cognitive abilities. Prior research has shown that chronic alcoholics often demonstrate impaired socio-cognitive and communicative abilities as well as emotion-related behaviors. Male alcoholics in particular suffer from dysfunctions in empathy. A study of the ability of chronic male alcoholics to recognize the emotional component of irony in relation to their empathic abilities has found a clear deficit.

Results will be published in the February 2013 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.

"Chronic alcohol abuse seems to have effects on the perception and decoding of emotional expressions," said Simona Amenta, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Milano-Bicocca, lecturer at the Catholic University of Milan, and corresponding author for the study. "It has been associated with higher frequencies of alexithymia, meaning deficits in emotion recognition and verbalization, leading to difficulties in distinguishing and comprehending people's emotional states, and then using emotional information to plan social and interactive acts. While alcoholic subjects seem to be able to correctly recognize emotions like joy and disgust, they show a tendency to overestimate anger and other negative emotions like fear and sadness."

A person's face is a complex stimulus which conveys different emotional, motivational and social cues at the same time, explained Amenta. "The ability to recognize social and emotional cues from facial expressions is particularly impaired in alcoholic individuals," she said. "While empathy refers to insights into the emotional states of other people, empathic ability is a more complex psychological inference which involves observation and recognition of emotional cues, especially facial expressions and vocal prosody."

Alcohol's neurotoxic effects are particularly damaging to the prefrontal cortex, Amenta said, and neuropsychological studies have shown that the prefrontal cortex plays a basic role in humor processing. "As a communicative phenomenon, humor retains two fundamental components," she said. "The first is cognitive and deals with the comprehension of humorous material, the second is affective and it is related to jokes appreciation. Alcoholics show impairments for both the cognitive and affective components required in humor processing. Furthermore, male alcoholics, despite any particular dysfunctional behavior, have consistently reported showing worst performances in emotional and empathic behaviors. Finally, since irony is a complex linguistic and pragmatic phenomenon whose understanding requires a number of cognitive and meta-cognitive abilities, and since these abilities are specifically weakened or impaired in alcoholism, we believed that irony might represent an optimal case to explore the relation of these competencies with language comprehension."

Amenta and her colleagues recruited 44 males -- 22 male alcoholic patients recruited during their third week of detoxification from a Brussels clinic, and 22 of their male acquaintances or "controls" -- to participate in a story comprehension task. All participants were asked to read stories with either an ironic or a non-ironic ending, and then fill in a questionnaire about communicative intentions and the emotional states of the stories' characters. Furthermore, comprehension of the ironic meaning was also assessed through a self-reported questionnaire, and then related to an Empathy Quotient (EQ) that had been measured during a pre-experimental phase.

"Our work's main findings are twofold," said Amenta. "First, we gained behavioral evidence concerning the role of emotions in language understanding. We were able to observe that a weakened emotional and empathic ability indeed affected the way linguistic contents were understood by the alcoholics. A second result, which we believe will be of more interest for clinicians, concerns alcoholics' impaired ability in understanding ironic stances. As we argue in the paper, understanding irony requires the ability to engage complex inferential processes that are mainly based on meta-representative thoughts. Of course, irony is just an example of the wide number of implicit forms of communication we use every day that involve complex inferential reasoning. Thus, our results seem to indicate that alcoholics might show a general impairment in understanding complex forms of communication."

More specifically, the alcoholics demonstrated: a deficit of empathic functions; a specific impairment of the "social skills" component of empathy; a disturbed comprehension of irony; difficulties in recognizing the emotional dimension in communication; difficulties in identifying speakers' emotional states and intentions; and an overestimation of positive emotions and a misunderstanding of the negative connotation of ironic situations.

"The most striking example concerns the different pattern of emotions that alcoholic subjects recognized in ironic stances," said Amenta. "Our study used irony to criticize. Our control subjects mostly indicated that ironic comments expressed a negative attitude and negative emotions. On the contrary, alcoholic subjects judged ironic comments as expressing amusement and generally positive emotions. This result confirms that alcoholic subjects tend to underestimate negative emotions; it also suggests that the same situation might be read in a totally different way by an alcoholic individual and another person."

Amenta said that the field of alcohol studies has not closely examined emotions and language. "While a lot has been said on emotions recognition in faces, body postures, and gestures, only a few studies have explored the recognition of emotion in verbal language. We believe this topic should be investigated more, especially since problems in social interaction are considered a relevant outcome, but also one possible cause, of alcohol dependence."