At the age of 24, Jordan Barnes woke up next to a lifeless body, rifled through his dead friends’ pockets for any remaining heroin, and went right back to using. Strung out and homeless during the supposed best years of his life, there was no clear way out of the opioid crisis ravaging the streets of Portland, Oregon. But though Jordan had long accepted his fate, his parents still held out hope and would do everything in their power to get him the help he so desperately needed.

In the tradition of Orange Is the New Black and Jerry Stahl's Permanent Midnight, Amy Dresner's My Fair Junkie is an insightful, darkly funny, and shamelessly honest memoir of one woman's battle with all forms of addiction, hitting rock bottom, and forging a path to a life worth living.

At the request (well, it wasn't really a request) of his employers, Augusten lands in rehab, where his dreams of group therapy with Robert Downey Jr. are immediately dashed by grim reality of fluorescent lighting and paper hospital slippers. When Augusten is forced to examine himself, he finds himself in the worst trouble of all. Because when his thirty days are up, he has to return to his same drunken Manhattan life - and live it sober. Dry is the story of love, loss, and Starbucks as a Higher Power

A startlingly frank memoir, Quitter documents one woman's struggles with alcoholism and recovery, with essential new insights into addiction and treatment.

There are shelves of memoirs about overcoming the death of a parent, childhood abuse, rape, drug addiction, miscarriage, alcoholism, hustling, gangbanging, near-death injuries, drug dealing, prostitution, or homelessness. Cupcake Brown survived all these things before she'd even turned 20.

With heart-racing urgency and unflinching honesty, Jenkins takes you inside the grips of addiction and the desperate decisions it breeds. She is a born storyteller who lived an incredible story, from blackmail by an ex-boyfriend to a soul-shattering deal with a drug dealer, and her telling brims with suspense and unexpected wit. But the true surprise is her path to recovery. Tiffany breaks through the stigma and silence to offer hope and inspiration to anyone battling the disease - whether it’s a loved one or themselves.

Fifteen million Americans a year are plagued with alcoholism. Five million of them are women. Many of them, like Caroline Knapp, started in their early teens and began to use alcohol as "liquid armor", a way to protect themselves against the difficult realities of life. In this extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Knapp offers important insights not only about alcoholism, but about life itself and how we learn to cope with it.

Ever sworn off alcohol for January and found yourself drinking by the 7th? Think there's 'no point' in just one drink? Welcome! There are millions of us. This inspirational, aspirational and highly relatable narrative champions the benefits of sobriety with a three-pronged approach combining the author's personal experience, factual reportage and contributions from expert sources and self-help advice for anyone who wants to reduce their alcohol intake or eliminate it completely.

A memoir of unblinking honesty and poignant, laugh-out-loud humor, Blackout is the story of a woman stumbling into a new kind of adventure - the sober life she never wanted. For Sarah Hepola, alcohol was "the gasoline of all adventure". She spent her evenings at cocktail parties and dark bars where she proudly stayed till last call. But there was a price. Publicly, she covered her shame with self-deprecating jokes, and her career flourished, but as the blackouts accumulated, she could no longer avoid a sinking truth.

Craig Beck is a well-regarded family man with two children, a nice home, and a successful media career; a director of several companies and at one time the trustee of a large children’s charity. Outwardly, Craig was a highly successful and functioning professional man in spite of a ‘two-bottles-of-wine-a-night" drinking habit. For 20 years he struggled to control his drinking, all the time refusing to label himself an alcoholic because he didn't believe he met the stereotypical image that the word portrayed.

In this timely and profoundly original book, best-selling writer and physician Gabor Maté looks at the epidemic of addictions in our society, tells us why we are so prone to them, and what is needed to liberate ourselves from their hold on our emotions and behaviours.

Why Don't You Drink Alcohol? is here to bust some serious myths about ladies and libations. It's your go-to guide for all the sober-curious women out there and a friendly reminder for ladies in sobriety about why they swapped pinot for Perrier in the first place. Penned by Sienna, an ex-actress who traded stage scripts for sobriety journals, this audiobook is a candid chronicle of her journey from living sober through Alcoholics Anonymous to living it up, sans the spirits.

After years of hiding her addiction from everyone—stockpiling pills in her Louboutins and elaborately scheduling her withdrawals between PTA meetings, baby showers, and tennis matches—Laura Cathcart Robbins is running out of places to hide. She has learned the hard way that even her high-profile marriage and Hollywood lifestyle can’t protect her from the pain she’s keeping bottled up inside. Facing divorce, the possibility of a custody battle, and the insistent voice of internalized racism that nags at her as a Black woman in a white world, Laura wonders just how much more she can take.

In Push Off from Here, McKowen delves deeply into each of her nine points: what they mean, how they work, and how every person can live them. She addresses topics such as the correlation between trauma and addiction, the importance of radical honesty, letting go of the illusion of control, the value of community, a reminder that healing is a continual process, and that the process is a gift. Whether you’re just starting out or have been sober for decades, McKowen instructs us to be kind to ourselves: Change is messy and progress is rarely linear, but we can always push off from here.

This book is about pleasure. It’s also about pain. Most important, it’s about how to find the delicate balance between the two, and why now more than ever finding balance is essential. We’re living in a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli: drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting....

The psychiatric establishment and rehab industry in the Western world have branded addiction a brain disease based on evidence that brains change with drug use. But in The Biology of Desire, cognitive neuroscientist and former addict Marc Lewis makes a convincing case that addiction is not a disease and shows why the disease model has become an obstacle to healing. Lewis reveals addiction as an unintended consequence of the brain doing what it's supposed to do - seek pleasure and relief - in a world that's not cooperating.

Helen Russell has researched sadness from the inside out for her entire life. Her earliest memory is of the day her sister died. Her parents divorced soon after, and her mother didn’t receive the help she needed to grieve. Coping with her own emotional turmoil — including struggles with body image and infertility — she’s endured professional and personal setbacks as well as relationships that have imploded in truly spectacular ways. Even the things that brought her the greatest joy — like eventually becoming a parent — are fraught with challenges.

Addiction is a preventable, treatable disease, not a moral failing. As with other illnesses, the approaches most likely to work are based on science - not on faith, tradition, contrition, or wishful thinking. These facts are the foundation of Clean, a myth-shattering look at drug abuse by the author of Beautiful Boy. Based on the latest research in psychology, neuroscience, and medicine, Clean is a leap beyond the traditional approaches to prevention and treatment of addiction.

Challenging both the idea of the addict's "broken brain" and the notion of a simple "addictive personality", Unbroken Brain offers a radical and groundbreaking new perspective, arguing that addiction is a learning disorder, and shows how seeing the condition this way can untangle our current debates over treatment, prevention, and policy.

From New York Times bestselling author of Symptoms of Withdrawal and Moments of Clarity Christopher Kennedy Lawford comes a book that will save lives. For most of his early life, Christopher Kennedy Lawford battled life-threatening drug and alcohol addictions. Now in recovery for more than 25 years, he works to effect change and raise global awareness of addiction in nonprofit, private, and government circles, serving as the goodwill ambassador for drug dependence treatment and care for the United Nations.

In Glow Kids, Dr. Nicholas Kardaras will examine how technology - more specifically, age-inappropriate screen tech, with all of its glowing ubiquity - has profoundly affected the brains of an entire generation. Brain imaging research is showing that stimulating glowing screens are as dopaminergic (dopamine activating) to the brain’s pleasure center as sex. And a growing mountain of clinical research correlates screen tech with disorders like ADHD, addiction, anxiety, depression, increased aggression, and even psychosis.

The memoir of a neuroscientist whose research led him to a bizarre personal discovery, James Fallon had spent an entire career studying how our brains affect our behavior when his research suddenly turned personal. While studying brain scans of several family members, he discovered that one perfectly matched a pattern he’d found in the brains of serial killers. This meant one of two things: Either his family’s scans had been mixed up with those of felons or someone in his family was a psychopath.

Even smart kids do stupid things. It's a simple fact of life. No one makes it through the teenage years unscathed - not the teens and not their parents. But now there's expert help for both generations in this groundbreaking new guide for surviving the drama of adolescence. In WHY Do They Act That Way? nationally renowned, award-winning psychologist Dr. David Walsh explains exactly what happens to the human brain on the path from childhood into adolescence and adulthood.

Steve Biddulph's Raising Boys was a global phenomenon. The first book in a generation to look at boys' specific needs, parents loved its clarity and warm insights into their sons' inner world. But today, things have changed. It's girls that are in trouble. There has been a sudden and universal deterioration in girls' mental health, starting in primary school and devastating the teen years. Steve Biddulph's Raising Girls is both a guidebook and a call to arms for parents.

It’s the nagging question more and more of us are finding harder to ignore, whether we have a “problem” with alcohol or not. In the face of how we care for ourselves otherwise, it’s hard to avoid how alcohol really makes us feel: terrible. How different would our lives be if we stopped drinking on autopilot? If we stopped drinking altogether? Frank, funny, and always judgment-free, Sober Curious is a bold guide to choosing to live hangover-free, from Ruby Warrington, one of the leading voices of the new sobriety movement.

The psychiatric emergency room, a fast-paced combat zone with pressure to match, thrusts its medical providers into the outland of human experience where they must respond rapidly and decisively in spite of uncertainty and, very often, danger. In this lively first-person narrative, Paul R. Linde takes listeners behind the scenes at an urban psychiatric emergency room, with all its chaos and pathos, where we witness mental health professionals doing their best to alleviate suffering.

Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent more than three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust.

Why do we think, feel, and act in ways we wish we did not? For decades, New York Times best-selling author Dr. David A. Kessler has studied this question with regard to tobacco, food, and drugs. Over the course of these investigations, he identified one underlying mechanism common to a broad range of human suffering. This phenomenon - capture - is the process by which our attention is hijacked and our brains commandeered by forces outside our control.

No parent experienced their teen years the way that children do today. This guide provides strategies and tips for actively learning the world of our children.

Craig Beck is a well-regarded family man with two children, a nice home, and a successful media career; a director of several companies and at one time the trustee of a large children’s charity. Outwardly, Craig was a highly successful and functioning professional man in spite of a ‘two-bottles-of-wine-a-night" drinking habit. For 20 years he struggled to control his drinking, all the time refusing to label himself an alcoholic because he didn't believe he met the stereotypical image that the word portrayed.

Lisa Smith was a bright young lawyer at a prestigious law firm in New York City when alcoholism and drug addiction took over her life. What was once a way she escaped her insecurity and negativity as a teenager became a means of coping with the anxiety and stress of an impossible workload. Girl Walks Out of a Bar explores Smith's formative years, her decade of alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, and her road to recovery.

This is an honest, upfront, relatable account of one suburban housewife's journey from miserable wine-soaked boozer to self-respecting sober lady. This audiobook is an inspirational tale of self-transformation, addiction, and domesticity.

A shy, bookish college graduate from a solid middle-class home, Kate Holden was uncertain of her way in life. When she decided to try her first hit of heroin, she did not anticipate that the drug would take over. Desperation drove her first to offer her body on the streets and then in high-class brothels, where she discovered hidden strengths as well as parts of herself that frightened her. With the acceptance and unyielding love of a family that never abandoned her, Kate Holden ultimately defeated the drug and left her netherworld behind.

From earliest experimentation to habitual excess to full-blown abuse, 24-year-old Koren Zailckas leads us through her experience of a terrifying trend among young girls, exploring how binge drinking becomes routine, how it becomes "the usual". With the stylistic freshness of a poet and the dramatic gifts of a novelist, Zailckas describes her first sip at 14, alcohol poisoning at 16, blacked-out sexual experience at 19, and total disorientation after waking up in an unfamiliar New York City apartment at 22.

The single glass of wine with dinner... the cold beer on a hot day... the champagne flute raised in a toast... what I'd drink if Hunter S. Thompson wanted to get wasted with me... these are my fantasies lately. Too bad I've gone sober. When Sacha Z. Scoblic was drinking, she was a rock star; the days were rough and the nights filled with laughter and blackouts. Then she gave it up. She had to. Here are her adventures in an utterly and maddeningly sober world... and how she discovered that nothing is as odd and fantastic as life without a drink in hand.

Healing the Addicted Brain is a breakthrough work that focuses on treating drug and alcohol addiction as a biological disease - based on the Recovery Science program that has helped thousands of patients defeat their addictions. It combines the best behavioral addiction treatments with the latest scientific research into brain functions, providing tools and strategies designed to overcome the biological factors that cause addictive behavior along with proven treatments and medications.

One phone call. That's all it took to change Stephanie Wittels Wachs's life forever.... Her younger brother Harris, a star in the comedy world known for his work on shows like Parks and Recreation, had died of a heroin overdose. How do you make sense of such a tragic end to a life of so much hilarious brilliance? In beautiful, unsentimental, and surprisingly funny prose, Stephanie Wittels Wachs alternates between her brother's struggle with addiction, which she learned about three days before her wedding, and the first year after his death, in all its emotional devastation.

My name is Brett. I'm a college-educated man who was once a husband of 26 years with two children, three businesses, and a large home with an actual white picket fence. I'm also a drug addict. And I have a tale to tell. It's about the despair of addiction and the absolute certainty that it can be overcome. Recovery is not simply abstinence, but a process of growing up. I spent my entire life searching for the key to long-term sobriety. I would like to share with you what I have learned.

On March 2, 1998, 10-year-old Natascha Kampusch was kidnapped and found herself locked in a house that would be her home for the next eight years. She was starved, beaten, treated as a slave, and forced to work for her deranged captor. But she never forgot who she was, and she never gave up hope of returning to the world. This is her story.

Kristina, the second of four children, begins by telling how a little sip of vodka sipped secretly at a party her parents were giving started her on a pathway to addiction. In that instant, alcohol became her pathway to comfort. Over the next eight years, she sank further into addiction, moving on to cocaine and methamphetamines. In telling her story, she gives a brutally honest description of her addiction and crimes.