Addiction psychiatrist and bioethicist Carl Erik Fisher explores addiction and recovery from the widest possible diversity of perspectives: from science to spirituality, from philosophy to politics, and everything in between. He interviews leading experts in areas such as psychology, neurobiology, history, sociology, and more--as well as policy makers, advocates, and people with lived experience. A core commitment of the show is we need more than medicine to truly understand addiction and re ...
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The Zen Way of Recovery, with Laura Burges
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Join me on Sunday, September 8th, at 12 PM Eastern Time (9 AM Pacific) for From Recovering to Flourishing: A Foundational Workshop. Before spending three years in a Buddhist monastery and becoming a 3rd grade teacher, Laura Burges was exploring the world of alcohol and drugs, from opium dens in Afghanistan to a tent in Juneau, Alaska. After near-de…
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The Supreme Court Blocks the Purdue Pharma Opioid Settlement, with Ryan Hampton
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This is a milestone for the Flourishing After Addiction podcast: our first repeat guest! I wanted to have Ryan Hampton back on the pod for a quick hit: to discuss the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on the controversial bankruptcy settlement involving Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family. As you may know, the Court rejected the settlement involving P…
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How to help people change, with Dr. Carrie Wilkens
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Carrie Wilkens is a psychologist with over 25 years of experience in the practice and dissemination of evidence-based treatments for substance use and post-traumatic stress. She and her team at the Center for Motivation and Change have developed the Invitation to Change approach for families and loved ones of people struggling with substance use, a…
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Stash, Sedatives and A Life In Hiding, with Laura Cathcart Robbins
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One of the great gifts of being out in the world talking about addiction and recovery is I get to meet so many fascinating and talented people working on these issues. This is one of my deepest motivations for writing and speaking about my own experience; to connect with other values-aligned writers and thinkers. One wonderful recent example is the…
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Why We Can’t Therapize Our Way Out of Addiction, with Dr. Bruce Alexander
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In this episode of Flourishing After Addiction, I had the honor of speaking with Bruce Alexander, a towering figure in the field of addiction theory. As regular Rat Park readers will know, I named this newsletter after Bruce’s iconic experiment in the 1970s, honoring not just that experiment, but also the decades of contributions he’s made since to…
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What's Wrong? Personal Histories of Chronic Pain and Bad Medicine, with Erin Williams
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As a bonus for this special episode with the artist Erin Williams, author of What’s Wrong? Personal Histories of Chronic Pain and Bad Medicine, I got permission to post some of the illustrations from her new book, What’s Wrong? Personal Histories of Chronic Pain and Bad Medicine. Head over to my Substack page to see those. You won’t want to miss th…
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Taking Ownership of Your Recovery Journey, with Dr. Ray Baker
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Dr. Ray Baker is a distinguished leader in the field of addiction medicine and a person in long-term recovery from addiction. This episode of Flourishing After Addiction particularly resonates with the theme of the longer-form writings I’m starting to post about frameworks for making sense of recovery, so I’m grateful to have the chance to talk wit…
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Brutalities: Exercise, Extremity, and Love , with Margo Steines
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In the latest episode of Flourishing After Addiction, I am thrilled to be exploring the intricate relationships between addiction, recovery, pain, and embodiment with Margo Steines, a writer and person in recovery with a deep understanding of these themes. Margo Steines holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Arizona and serves as…
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Shame and Self-Stigma: Strategies for Change, with Dr. Jason Luoma
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Shame and self-stigma can be powerfully limiting and harmful, and they are especially common among people with addictions. We’ve discussed on prior episodes of the podcast that there may be valuable and wise forms of shame, but psychotherapy research has also shown that the wrong sort of relationship to shame can also inhibit growth and stand in th…
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Navigating the Complexities of Addiction Treatment and Recovery, with Dr. Brian Hurley
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For this episode of Flourishing After Addiction, I wanted a guest who could offer some insights into the journey of seeking help for addiction and recovery. What is going wrong with our systems and services, and where can people actually find care? Brian Hurley is the ideal person to help us with these questions, with his extensive experience as a …
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A Buddhist Approach to Compulsive Eating, Food Addiction, and Emotional Sobriety, with Valerie Mason-John
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Valerie Mason-John (Vimalasara) is a writer, Buddhist teacher, a person in recovery, and the founder of Eight Step Recovery. In this episode of Flourishing After Addiction, Vimalasara shares their transformative journey, beginning with childhood in an orphanage and evolving through various addictions, with a particular focus on their struggle with …
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How Not to Kill Yourself, with Prof Clancy Martin
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Clancy Martin is a philosopher, an author, a recovering alcoholic, and the survivor of more than ten suicide attempts. His new book, How Not to Kill Yourself, is a chronicle of his suicidal mind, and—of particular interest to us here—an investigation of the ways his suicidal thinking functioned like an addiction. We dive into all that and much more…
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Understanding addiction through contemplative science, with Dr. Jud Brewer
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Judson Brewer ("Dr. Jud") is a renowned addiction psychiatrist and neuroscientist who has spent over two decades studying the mechanisms of addiction and the effects of mindfulness on behavior change. On this episode of Flourishing After Addiction, it was great to talk with him about some extraordinary connections between the science of addiction a…
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Brain surgery for addiction, and finding your own path in recovery, with Zachary Siegel
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Zach Siegel is one of our most respected and prolific journalists on addiction and drug policy. He is also a thoughtful, introspective soul who thinks deeply about his own history of opioid addiction. In his many writings, he has often referenced that personal history, but he's never really had the chance to tell his own addiction story from start …
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On Psychological Flexibility and Reclaiming a Life Worth Living, with Dr. Steven Hayes
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A little over 40 years ago, Dr. Steven Hayes experienced his first panic attack—when he was a young assistant professor in psychology, no less! In the intervening years, and drawing in part on his own recovery from panic disorder, he developed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and produced a huge body of work that has revolutionized our understandi…
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Heroin-Assisted Treatment, and Making Sense of Addiction, with Prof Sir John Strang
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In the weeks prior to this episode, the story broke that the UK’s Middlesbrough clinic, which offered a pioneering Heroin Assisted Treatment (HAT) program, is slated to close because of budget cuts. Patients were allowed to self-administer medical-grade heroin (officially, diamorphine) under medical supervision. One of the key scientific studies th…
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Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis, with Beth Macy
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As I’ve written before, Beth Macy has an extraordinary gift for encapsulating our nation’s greatest challenges in gripping, intimate, and wise stories of everyday American struggles. She is a bestselling author of several books about addiction, inequality, and justice, and it was a great pleasure to talk to her about her latest book, Raising Lazaru…
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Spirituality and justice in addiction treatment, with Dr. Ayana Jordan
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Dr. Ayana Jordan is a renowned expert in addiction and other mental health conditions, newly recruited to NYU to an endowed professorship for her fascinating research. For this episode of Flourishing After Addiction, I was excited to talk to her about new frontiers in her research, such as incorporating spirituality and health equity in addiction m…
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From Psychoanalysis to Psychedelics: Therapy for Addiction, with Dr. Jeffrey Guss
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Dr. Jeffrey Guss sits at one of the most fascinating and unusual intersections in all of mental health: between psychoanalysis, addiction treatment, and psychedelic psychotherapy. I wanted to have someone on the show to talk more about the “paradigm-shifting” nature of psychedelic psychotherapy: what that means exactly, and at a macro level, how th…
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Crafting a Life in Recovery, with Prof. Melissa Febos
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Melissa Febos is one of our most accomplished memoirists and essayists, a passionate and fiercely honest writer who, across several of her works, has often discussed her own path through addiction and into recovery. (Among her many, many accolades, she is the recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and a National Book Critics Circle Aw…
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Transforming Addiction and Suffering with Philosophy, with Prof. Peg O'Connor
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From quite early in her life, Peg O’Connor felt a “double dose of shame” - from her lesbian identity on one hand, and her struggles with alcohol on the other. Her drinking problems almost got her expelled from high school, but instead she was able to stop. In her view, philosophy helped her immensely to get and stay sober, especially considering ho…
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Many Pathways to Holistic Recovery, with Holly Whitaker
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One important vision I have for this podcast is to share diverse experiences of addiction and recovery. How people write about it, yes, but even more importantly, the nitty gritty of how they made sense of their own addiction and found their way to recovery. Today’s guest, Holly Whitaker, is a fierce, passionate, and incisive writer who has charted…
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Healthy relationships in recovery, with Dr. Bevin Campbell
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58:22
Taking care of our relationships is a crucial way we take care of ourselves and the wider world. Some of the most common questions I get in my clinical practice and from listeners are questions about how to navigate relationships in addiction and recovery: couples, parents and kids, or otherwise. So I wanted to have a clinically focused episode abo…
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Our addiction to the self, with Dr. Mark Epstein
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Dr. Mark Epstein is a hero of mine. He is a Buddhist psychiatrist and author who has been a voice of kindness and wisdom in our field for decades, and I’ve long looked to his work for inspiration and guidance. So it was an honor to speak with him for this episode of the Flourishing After Addiction podcast! Mark does not have a personal history of a…
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Why history? With Prof. Benjamin Breen
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With so much suffering today, and in the midst of a historic overdose crisis, you might wonder: why bother looking to the distant past of addiction? How can the history of addiction actually help us? For me, I found that I needed history to make sense of what happened to me and my family. After studying addiction for a little while, I saw that idea…
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Recovery research: Beyond abstinence, with Dr. John Kelly
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How do we best tap into the positive side of recovery, beyond abstinence, sobriety, and remission? What does the science actually show about growing and changing in life after addiction? There is perhaps no one better equipped to answer those questions than my guest on today’s episode of the Flourishing After Addiction podcast: Dr. John Kelly, Harv…
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How to Be Loved—Writing about Addiction and Recovery, with Author Eva Hagberg
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A lot of us folks in recovery have big collections of self-help and memoir books, and with good reason. Books give us solace, they help us see how other people deal with similar challenges, they are a source of community through contact with other minds, and, as articulated by Eva Hagberg, this week’s guest on the Flourishing After Addiction podcas…
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Buddhist recovery, lovingkindness, and feeling comfortable in your own skin, with Buddhist teacher Gary Sanders
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As Ram Dass once said, “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.” I’m thinking about this quote as many of us are grappling with the Omicron variant and trying to make the most of this winter break. This time of year can be hard for everyone, and I’m also thinking about all of us in recovery who have difficult family histo…
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Self-control, the science of social psychology, and “The Power of Us,” with Dr. Jay Van Bavel
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What happens when we define ourselves in terms of group memberships? How does culture and society affect our capacity for self-control and self-regulation? Why does the toxic binary of “us” versus “them” seem to be so powerful these days? How can we instead use our shared identities to improve our wellbeing and work toward harmony and flourishing? …
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Working with the Shame of Addiction: a Philosopher's Perspective, with Prof. Owen Flanagan Jr.
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Owen Flanagan is a philosopher who has long studied topics like consciousness, neuroscience, morality, and responsibility. But early in his career, even while racking up accolades for his pathbreaking work, drinking was already taking hold of his life. Things took a dramatic turn in the 1990s when a brain tumor and a medication reaction sent him ov…
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An insider’s view of the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy case, and how to fight for change without sacrificing personal recovery, with advocate and writer Ryan Hampton
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Ryan Hampton, an alumnus of the Clinton White House, had an up-and-coming career in politics until the early 2000s, when he became addicted to OxyContin, then heroin. After he entered recovery in 2015, he became a prominent advocate on addiction issues, from community-based organizing to national activities, such as helping to release the first-eve…
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Psychedelics for addiction and “the freedom within,” with psychiatric researcher Dr. Elias Dakwar
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In mental health treatment today, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is nothing less than a sensation, and some of the most promising results are in addiction treatment. Droves of people—from researchers and clinicians to underground shamans and private funders—are hailing the re-emergence of psychedelics like psilocybin, MDMA, ayahuasca, and ketam…
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“Health in All” to prevent and treat addiction, with public health leader Dr. Wilnise Jasmin.
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Flourishing after addiction requires flourishing for all. The public health of addiction and recovery has several important lessons, not just how to respond to the overdose crisis, but also, and more concretely, how to think holistically about addiction and all the factors that support someone’s recovery. How to protect the mental health of ourselv…
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Mindful Recovery from Addiction, Pain, and “MORE,” with Dr. Eric Garland
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For decades, clinicians have used mindfulness-based interventions to treat stress, physical pain, and mental disorders. But there’s more to meditation than “mindfulness” alone, and the next wave of researchers in this field is still working out how to incorporate other practices from the wisdom traditions that gave rise to mindfulness-based treatme…
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What is recovery? With Dr. Katie Witkiewitz
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Six percent of American adults say they are “in recovery” from a problem with alcohol or other drugs, but it’s not always clear exactly what that means. Even among researchers who study the concept, the definition of “recovery” is far from settled: does it require abstinence? does it necessarily involve lofty concepts like spirituality and citizens…
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A Compassionate Alternative to the War on Drugs, with Maia Szalavitz
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Roughly 35 years ago, harm reduction saved Maia Szalavitz’s life. It was 1986 in the East Village, and though Maia was an Ivy League kid who read two newspapers a day, she had no idea that her regular intravenous heroin use put her at risk for HIV. Thanks to a chance encounter, though, Maia learned about some simple harm reduction practices that he…
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Beyond Mindfulness: Integrating Buddhism and Recovery, with Buddhist teacher Kevin Griffin
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This episode’s interview is with Kevin Griffin, a Buddhist teacher who has trained with some of the leading Western Vipassana teachers—including Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Ajahn Amaro—and who himself is a leader in the mindful recovery movement. Kevin is one of the founders of the Buddhist Recovery Network, an organization that promotes …
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I'm Carl Erik Fisher, and this is Flourishing After Addiction, a new podcast exploring addiction and recovery from the widest possible diversity of perspectives. I'd love to hear from you. Please head over to http://www.carlerikfisher.com to connect.By Carl Erik Fisher
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