themanchestereveningnews--2019-01-10--The silent addiction Tragedy of mum found dead after being hooked on painkillers for 28 years

The silent addiction: Tragedy of mum found dead after being hooked on painkillers for 28 years

A mum who was so addicted to painkillers she begged neighbours to give her their pills accidentally overdosed.  Amanda Harris, 45, took so many pills for her aches and pain she developed a ''Jekyll and Hyde'' temperament and was barely able to walk -  yet a batch of painkillers would be delivered to her home each week.  When one GP reduced the weekly dosage, Miss Harris would take her prescription batch in one go - then became so desperate for more tablets she would persuade friends and neighbours to give her medication they themselves had been prescribed for their own conditions.  Last August she was found dead at her home in Rossendale by her boyfriend after taking a toxic cocktail of Morphine plus Tramadol, and Dihydrocodeine.  Tests showed the morphine and codeine in her system was at a fatal level and some of the drugs had been prescribed to her by her GP.  The tragedy occurred just weeks after the NHS was warned it was fuelling an ''addiction crisis'' and a ''silent epidemic'' because of an increase in the prescribing of powerful painkillers.  Nearly 24 million opioids, such as morphine, were prescribed in 2017 - equivalent to 2,700 packs an hour - which was 10 million more prescriptions than those issued 10 years previously.  An inquest heard Miss Harris, known as Mandy, who lived alone in Rawtenstall had developed an addiction to codeine when she was just 17 after starting the medication to help her long-term pain across her legs.  Shirley Smith, a close neighbour told the inquest in Burnley: “She complained about her pain often. She used to come round on Saturdays and stayed all day and we would speak to each other on the phone in between.  “She told me about the tablet she was taking but I didn’t know about the morphine. She used to struggle with pain and asked for painkillers.  “I told her it was silly to take other people’s painkillers. She had concerns about going to the GP but I don’t know why, I told her they were okay.  “They had prescribed her painkillers including codeine but she took them all at once at one time. She used it for many years and told me that she was addicted to it. She had difficulties walking as her legs were swollen as well as her feet.  ''Her medication was dispensed and delivered weekly to her home address but she was getting additional painkillers from somewhere else. Somebody would come and she bought them from them.  ''She would come round sweating sometimes but that was due to the drugs. She asked me for tablets and I said no. She has taken tablets for many years. She told me she has been addicted to codeine since she was 17.  “She would even ask me for my painkillers. The doctors would give her painkillers that were strong enough to have one a day but she was also buying them from another source. ''  Mrs Smith, who had one child, added: “Mandy had no intention to end her life. She was happy and she told me what she planned on doing in the future. She was trying to self medicate.  I told her not to take other people’s tablets. I told her that everything goes through your kidneys and she could end up with kidney failure. I miss her. She helped me a lot.”  Miss Harris' partner Brian Jones  said: “She would knock on doors asking if they had any spare tablets. She told me she was trying to get hold of them and her appearance was going rapidly downhill.  “She was frightened to go outside and struggled.  When we got together she started improving herself after that as she would change her clothes, wash again, and brush her hair. She was picking herself up slowly.  One day I said ‘shall we go shopping?’. She said to me ‘if you are with me I will be alright’.  “We had to link arm in arm and she was unsure of what was going on. I don’t think she had been out properly for 3 to 4 years.  I took her out to the local for a couple of hours one time. She had four cocktails and that was it. She was not heavy drinker.  “I took her out on her birthday for a few hours as well, she wasn’t drinking.  I know she would ask anyone if they had any painkillers. She would knock on the neighbours doors and ask for some including me.  “I thought she was pulling herself up from being so down and improving herself. She would put make-up on and she was starting to look more acceptable.  From there it went haywire. I don’t know why. Her temper was bad and sometimes she could be like Jekyll and Hyde.  “One minute she was nice, the next not. I put up with it. She went from improving to, what happened, I don’t know.  Her hair was matted at times and knotted, but they did start to come out after a while.  “She said the doctor would only give her eight tablets to last a week. They had reduced it as she had taken an overdose before. It was more of a cry for help.  On 9th August there was a delivery guy who came with her prescription. I saw her take the tablets, shut her door and I didn’t see her after that. I kept wondering what was going on as I would usually see the bathroom light on or something.  “I got back home at around 7 PM on the 12th and I called her dad as I was worried. He told me there was a spare key nearby and I managed to get in.  I found her on the floor under a pile of blankets. It was too late.”  Coroner Richard Taylor recorded a conclusion of misadventure and said: “This was a lady who has been in discomfort for many years and taking medication, some prescribed some not.  With this she has taken a cocktail of painkillers and some alcohol, and her body couldn’t tolerate it. That in my estimation was a mistake on her behalf.  “It was an unintentional outcome of an intentional action. She didn’t intent to end her life. She had taken medication - but not all that had been prescribed to her.”  No doctor or healthcare professional gave evidence at the inquest.  In March 2018 a report revealed more than two million working age people in England were estimated to have taken a prescription painkiller that was not prescribed for them in 2016-17. The prescribing rate of opioid painkillers in parts of northern England is four times higher than in London.  A study by the Public Health Research Consortium, published in 2017 found the proportion of patients being prescribed opioid painkillers by their GP had doubled in 15 years. But the Royal College of GPs said doctors would not prescribe opioid painkillers as a "quick fix".  Got a story or an issue you want us to investigate? Want to tell us about something going on where you live? Let us know - in complete confidence - by emailing newsdesk@men-news.co.uk, calling us on 0161 211 2920, tweeting us @MENnewsdesk or messaging us on our Facebook page . You can also send us a story tip using the form here . Join the Manchester Evening News breaking news Facebook group for a place to read and talk about breaking news in Greater Manchester.


themanchestereveningnews--2019-03-18--Does social media addiction exist

Does social media addiction exist?

There are over three billion people who are logged onto social media sites across the world. Every day, they like statuses on Facebook, retweet their favourite posts on Twitter, and pose for selfies on Instagram.  There are concerns that users - in particular, young people - are spending too much time online. A group of MPs believe that the addictive behaviour on social media should be treated as a disease, reports Perspecs.  However, the research behind social media 'addiction' has been attacked as "poorly done" and "bad science".  MPs have called for more "robust" research on the addictive effects of social media, likening it to "cigarettes, alcohol, gambling or drugs", the Evening Standard reports.  The all-party parliamentary group, that looks at social media and young people’s mental health, say that social media addiction should be treated as a disease.  Chris Elmore, the Labour MP who chairs the group, said it is vital that the government takes "real and meaningful action to get to grips with the crisis unfolding online".  He said: "It’s essential that we urgently commission robust research into the impact social media is having on our young people and review whether it warrants being classified as an official disease.  "Just as with other addictions – cigarettes, alcohol, gambling or drugs – we need to realise that while a scroll through Facebook might not have any apparent physical effects, the damage it can do to someone’s mental health must not be underestimated."  A report by the group criticised the “lack of legislative response” to regulate platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.  Social media has become an integral part in the daily routines of young people, and it can have "very damaging effects" on their mental health and wellbeing.  They said: "It is paramount that we protect young people to ensure they are kept safe and healthy when they are online."  However, the Business Insider argues that there is "no concrete evidence" that social media is addictive.  They say that a lot of research on social media addiction has been "characterised by poorly done studies and bad science".  Andrew Przybylski, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, told the Business Insider that many of the studies conducted about social media and a person's wellbeing are too small to carry a lot of statistical power.  He said: "People are making expansive claims about the link between wellbeing and tech use, but if this was displayed on a Venn diagram, the circles would overlap one quarter of one per cent.  "It is literally the lowest quality of evidence that you could give that people wouldn't laugh you out of the room."  A UNICEF review on social media and screen time from 2017 also noted the lack of evidence about the addiction. It said: "Claims that the brain might be hijacked or re-wired by digital technology are not supported by neuroscience evidence and should be treated with scepticism."  The Business Insider adds that classifying reliance on digital tools as an addiction "simply isn't fair to the people whose lives have been torn apart by things like alcoholism or drug use".  While "social media addiction" is a widely-used term, it has not yet been designated as a mental health disorder.  There are two established organisations which classify mental health disorders: the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the American Psychiatric Association.  According to the BBC, any alleged addiction needs to fit certain criteria - and there needs to be a vast amount of research to confirm whether it is pathological behaviour.  In 2018, gaming addiction was listed as a mental health condition for the first time by WHO. To be diagnosed with 'gaming disorder', the addiction will normally have been evident for at least 12 months, resulting in significant impairment in "personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning".


themanchestereveningnews--2019-06-02--I slept with 2000 women and it wasnt enough - my lifelong battle with addiction

'I slept with 2000 women and it wasn't enough - my lifelong battle with addiction'

Many of us will admit to a bit of binge drinking and food blow outs - but for James Davenport, excess ruled his life for 35 years.  The former boxer, known as Shinny, is a recovering addict. Not just alcohol - but anything he could get his hands on, from food to drugs to sex.  Between the ages of 13 and 38, Shinny, now 42, from Salford, says he slept with 2,000 women - from girlfriends to one night stands to prostitutes.  But it wasn't enough.  “Alcohol, drugs, sex - anything. The quick, instant gratification was what I wanted", he said.  “From the age of about 12 or 13 when I went fully into sex, up until I was about 38, I calculated that I probably slept with about 2,000 women.  “I picked up prostitutes, women from clubs, anywhere. I could have between five and 10 women over the course of a weekend. But it wasn’t enough.  “I even started questioning my own sexuality at one point.”  Shockingly, his sexually compulsive behaviour started aged 10, along with his taste for alcohol.  “I would manipulate older girls to perform sex acts on me,” he said. “I was very mature at an early age, my thinking was like a teenager. I knew it was wrong, but it excited me. I couldn’t help myself.  “Addicts become experts at manipulating and we will do anything to get what we want. For me it was simple to manipulate a girl older than me and convince her it was OK to do what we were doing.  “The alcoholism started around the same age. I remember drinking alcohol at my grandparents. It was some form of lager in a tap barrel in their spare room. I loved the way it made me feel.”  Bizarrely, Shinny - who hosts a recovery talk show on YouTube - can pinpoint his obsessive behaviour back to the age of seven, when he started his first addiction - vinegar.  “I used to steal it and drink it out of the bottle,” remembers Shinny. “With vinegar, I think I got a kick from it, a bit like with a chilli.  “I also remember drinking out of a dirty puddle, and have only recently found out, during my recovery, that it was also part of the addiction. As I drank it I remember thinking - I have made my own decision to do that and no one knows what I’ve done.  “Along with that my behaviour was up the wall. I used to wet the bed and was scared of the dark when I was younger. I always felt like an outsider looking in. Through my addictions and behaviour I was trying to escape my own thinking.”  By high school Shinny - who also struggled with bulimia for 20 years - was sniffing aerosols, smoking weed and doing harder drugs.  That developed into selling drugs and becoming involved in Salford gangs.  “Sex, drugs, rock and roll, violence and criminal activity was my life,” he said. “Alcoholism has nothing to do with alcohol as such, it’s the feeling that it gives you. Anything that excites me - I'm in.  “Later on I became involved in criminal activity. I wanted to be the most successful, hardest drug dealer. And the most handsome. I can go to bed thinking about myself, dream about myself and wake up thinking about myself. Addicts are very self-obsessed people.”  Shinny believes that coming to terms with being estranged from his alcoholic father as a youngster played a part in his own battles, which also include anxiety and depression.  But he is grateful to have been able to forgive him before he died seven years ago.  Father-of-two Shinny's lowest point was when he planned his own suicide - but his love for his children, aged 15 and eight, ultimately was the kick he needed to get clean.  “I planned how I was going to do it, and how. It’s so sad to think that it can get that dark. When my partner left and I could not be with my children anymore, that was what I needed to sort myself out.  “I went into detox in 2014. Since then I have had one relapse, but as of June 1, I will be two years clean.”  Despite a relapse in 2017, Shinny has turned his life around with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12-step programme, and the support of his partner Nicole Evans.  Now, two years clean from the suffocating effects of the disease, Shinny - who released a Christmas single in December 2016 - is using his experience to educate people about addiction through a hard-hitting, personal documentary called The Making of an Addict.  A 12-minute teaser of the biopic, directed by Chris Green, was screened Saturday morning at HOME and is available to view on Shinny's official Facebook page.  He now aims to make the full movie, which he then hopes to take round schools as an education tool for young people.  “I want this film to be the new Kes, I want it to be an education to children in schools,” he explained, talking of the 1969 film by Ken Loach.  “I have channeled my addictions into getting well and helping others, and want to show others that it can be done. If it wasn’t for my girlfriend Nicole I wouldn’t be where I am today. She’s a massive part of my life.  “This disease is always going to be there. You can either wallow in it or fight. My first thought in the morning is always negative, but I quickly change that into a positive and pray to a higher power greater than me to keep me clean and sober for one more day.  “It’s a 24 hour reprieve. I don’t think about tomorrow. If I have to do this for the rest of my life to be a decent father and member of the community, I will.”  Watch the trailer for The Making of an Addict here .


thenewyorktimes--2019-05-03--Amy Klobuchar Proposes 100 Billion for Addiction and Mental Health

Amy Klobuchar Proposes $100 Billion for Addiction and Mental Health

Senator Amy Klobuchar on Friday released a $100 billion plan to combat drug and alcohol addiction and improve mental health care, focusing one of the first detailed proposals of her presidential campaign on an issue deeply personal to her.  Ms. Klobuchar — who has spoken before about her father’s alcoholism, including memorably at Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing — said she had developed the plan and made it an early focus in part because of that personal experience and in part because of the number of addiction-related stories she had heard from voters.  The bulk of the plan is divided into three segments.  • Prevention, including funding for mental health programs at schools, training for doctors to recognize early warning signs of addiction and other mental health problems, and a requirement that doctors use prescription drug monitoring programs intended to prevent “doctor shopping,” in which patients addicted to opioids receive new prescriptions from a number of doctors.  • Treatment, including funding for addiction and mental health programs and stricter enforcement of the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that insurers cover mental health care. The plan highlights in particular the need for more hospital beds and community clinics, especially in rural areas: Some of the counties hit hardest by the opioid crisis are rural, and many of them have no psychiatrists.


thesun--2019-01-10--What is porn addiction how to stop it and is counselling available

What is porn addiction, how to stop it and is counselling available?

The condition ruins lives, destroys relationships and can possibly cause physical injury  PORN addiction is a serious condition that ruins lives, destroys relationships and cause physical injury.  Here, we take a closer look at how addiction to pornography develops in the first place and how it can be treated.  It is a condition in which an individual has an unhealthy relationship with sexually graphic and explicit materials.  These can include magazines, books, videos, movies, graphic novels, and other formats that show sexual acts and/or sexualised images.  Like any addiction, the addict’s behaviour will be kept secret, with them going to great lengths to keep their habit a secret.  Like any addiction, porn addiction is down to naturally occurring chemicals in the brain which are released as porn is consumed.  Addiction centre Castle Craig Hospital says: “When an individual artificially overstimulates the release of these chemicals through the use of drugs, alcohol, sex, porn, or any other stimulus, the body develops a tolerance of and expectation for those chemicals that cannot be met through normal, healthy activities, and addicted individuals will continue to engage in unhealthy and even destructive behaviours in order to maintain the ‘high’ that has been artificially achieved.”  A new study claims that porn is just as addictive as gambling.  Women can also get addicted to porn, and suffer similar symptoms to men.  While women are traditionally more interested in erotica than porn, it is possible for them to become hooked on hardcore material.  Earlier this year, we met a 41-year-old porn addict who watches 60 hours of smutty movies a week… as her kids get on with their lives downstairs.  Men partial to perusing a lot of X-rated material are more likely to suffer erectile dysfunction – and it’s because they are so used to looking at kinky images, experts suggest.  And those men who prefer watching their fantasies played out on screen are also less likely to enjoy actually having sex, the study showed.  Researchers surveyed more than 300 men aged between 20 and 40 who visited a San Diego urology clinic for treatment.  They say: “In addition to relationship breakdowns, financial strain, loss of job and family, increasing isolation, anger, depression, anxiety, and irritability, some kinds of porn are illegal and prosecution of obtaining and or possessing these materials can carry serious legal consequences that may include but are not limited to prison, parole, being placed on a sex offender monitoring program, severe financial penalties, and a criminal record.”  As is true when dealing with any addict, it is very important to tread carefully when speaking to someone you suspect is hooked on porn.  They encourage being well informed before speaking to them, being supportive, and having plenty of information about their problem and what help is available to them.  Action star Terry Crews admitted last year that he struggled with porn addiction.  He confessed that he had gone to rehab to battle his compulsive porn viewing as it “messed up” his life and threatened to derail his marriage.  In a confessional video shared on Facebook, he said: “Some people say, ‘Hey, man … you can’t really be addicted to pornography.’  “But I’m gonna tell you something: If day turns into night and you are still watching, you probably have got a problem. And that was me.  “It changes the way you think about people. People become objects. People become body parts; they become things to be used rather than people to be loved.”  He explained that he quit porn about seven years ago, adding: “It affected everything. My wife was literally like, ‘I don’t know you anymore. I’m out of here.’ I had to change.  “I literally had to go to rehab for it.”  Former Coronation Street actor and Our Girl star Sean Ward has also spoken out about being addicted to pornography.  Speaking on Loose Women in January 2019, he opened up about his road to recovery: “I think finding out what my addictions were, where I was going wrong – you have to admit to yourself and that you are on a bad path.”  There is lots of help available for people who are struggling with porn addiction.  One is Sex Addiction Help, which offers an online recovery course.  People often find it hard to ask for help with their porn addiction, especially as there is a social stigma attached to being a compulsive masturbator or watching lots of porn.  Addicts may have received mixed messages from their spiritual community, family, or culture that discourages them from acknowledging the addiction because it has been labelled as shameful, weak, or evil.  However, help is available for both addicts and people affected by a loved one’s addiction.


thesun--2019-06-28--Porn addiction made me relieve myself at work but flop in bed with normal girls

Porn addiction made me relieve myself at work but flop in bed with ‘normal’ girls

IT’S the moment every man dreads – lying in bed with the girlfriend he cared for deeply, Ricky Granieri couldn’t perform.  But it wasn’t because the recruitment business leader, 31, didn’t fancy his other half, in fact the complete opposite was true.  Ricky was so used to viewing women as sex objects he couldn’t become aroused with someone he actually had feelings for.  “Ironically I found it harder to sexually connect with her as I grew to like her,” he says.  “Sex was fine if it was a one-night stand but when I started to care I couldn’t get aroused.”  Ricky is not alone - last year, a study of 2,000 British blokes found that a staggering 50 per cent have had difficulty getting and maintaining an erection.  As a result, the number of prescriptions for Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs has nearly tripled in the last decade.  But Ricky is no geek or social misfit, in fact he’s tall, dark and handsome and works out in his spare time.  Ricky is probably the last person many would expect to struggle in the sack, but he’s one of a growing number of young men who suffer erectile dysfunction - with experts blaming easy access to porn for the rising problem.  This is exactly where Ricky places the blame for his situation.  “One girl cried because I couldn’t get aroused when I was with her,” he says.  “I couldn’t connect with her sexually. It destroyed us. At the time I blamed her for not being like a porn star.  “It was only when it ended that it dawned on me she could never be like a porn star.  “That’s not real life. But after watching hours and hours of porn it was difficult to get aroused for a normal girl.”  When he says “hours and hours”, Ricky really means it – watching porn became almost like a full-time job.  “I’d be late for work - I was thinking about sex all the time,” he admits.  “I’d even go to the loo during office hours and pleasure myself.  “I stopped seeing girls as people. I couldn’t get aroused in real life around women.”  Ricky’s story is far from unique.  Research looking at sex and the internet shows that about a third of impotent men aged 18 – 40 blame porn use for their problem.  Given that men reach their sexual peak in their late teens and early 20s it’s clearly a massive issue, one which GP Dr Jeff Foster is seeing over and over again.  “We’re left having to undo the damage caused by watching porn. Having a doctor to talk to is a big starting point,” he said.  “The classic stereotypes I’ll see are young men who are having relationship issues because of erectile dysfunction.  “The main thing is to reassure young men that the reason they can’t maintain an erection (or get one) is down to the porn they're watching," he says.  This was exactly the issue for Ricky, who started looking at “dirty magazines” when he was ten.  Two years later he’d found VHS tapes of porn, and by 14 he’d lost his virginity.  Ricky reckons his 20-year porn habit is the reason he’s been single for most of his life. He blames it for his inability to emotionally and physically connect with a woman – in or out of bed.  Apart from anything the thrill of what he was watching quickly wore off, meaning he was constantly looking for new videos to get his kick.  So what has caused virile young men to swap real women for fantasies on a screen?  One issue is how prolific porn is - last month a BBC study found that over three quarters of men aged 18-25 had watched X-rated content within the last month.  Porn is available at the click of a button no matter where you are – there have even been calls for a new law to ban people from watching it on buses and trains now it’s so easily accessible on phones.  It's no surprise that before 2000 and the dawn of high-speed streaming sites just five per cent of blokes under 40 reported having issues getting it up.  In fact Ricky’s sex obsession was far from unique among his friends, who would regularly discuss the latest clips they’d seen.  “Blokes watch it privately, but talk about it all the time,” he says.  Some of his friends would even take breaks to relieve themselves when they were studying together at uni.  But relying on this kind of instant gratification makes having real relationships even harder, especially with many men too embarrassed to talk about their problem.  In fact, when 2,000 blokes were polled 27 per cent said they’d rather dump a lover than talk to their GP about erectile problems.  As well as asking how much porn these men are watching, Dr Foster suggests medics need to be a less willing to dish out the little blue pills.  “The danger a lot of GPs in my field are falling into is hearing of the problem and prescribing Viagra,” he says.  “Giving it to a 21-year-old is not usually the answer.”  Viagra ads might show a middle-aged bloke with grey hair grateful for the pep up, but the new reality is under 40s are relying on them more and more.  In fact, 31 per cent of 30-somethings with erectile dysfunction have been given Viagra by their GP, according to the Co-op pharmacy.  But taking a pill to boost your sexual prowess won’t solve the issue if you’re also hooked on porn.  Ricky’s turning point came when he realised he preferred porn to real-life relationships.  “Four years ago I realised I needed to sort this out so I could have a normal sex life,” he says.  “I restricted myself to watching it once or twice a week.  “But sexual images are everywhere: buses, ads on tube, even ice-lolly adverts are a trigger. It’s like putting food in front of a dog. It destroyed sex for me during my 20s.”  Ricky is now in a relationship with a woman who challenges him to sexually satisfy her.  “When we’re in bed she makes me look at her and the eye contact really works,” he says.  “She deliberately slows the whole sexual act down.  “Now I don’t watch porn, I’ve stopped seeing women as a ‘thing.’ I’ve finally found a healthy balance between sex and sexual intimacy.”  Dr Foster believes Ricky was right to kick porn cold turkey.  “The longer you have sex by yourself the more it becomes an addiction,” he says.  “I view porn addiction the same as an alcohol addiction. For those people I tell them, ‘Stop watching porn.’ It really has to be that brutal.”


thesun--2019-09-23--I saw a counsellor to help me with my sex addiction and ended up bedding him

I saw a counsellor to help me with my sex addiction… and ended up bedding him

SOME consider it merely an excuse for sleeping around. But scientists in Sweden reckon sex addiction really does exist.  They point to higher levels of the “cuddle hormone” oxytocin in sex addicts.  The study’s author, Professor Jussi Jokinen, says: “There is emerging evidence that sex addiction is a medical diagnosis with a neurological cause.”  That is no consolation for 34-year-old Bristol estate agent Rachel Evans*.  Her craving for sex has cost her jobs, friendships and relationships. Here, she tells Georgette Culley her story.  TEARS escape my eyes as I unravel in his arms.  I can still feel the warmth of his body as I scramble to pick up my underwear strewn over the floor.  The clock on the wall strikes 11 and the man who was ripping off my clothes ten minutes ago suddenly sits bolt upright.  As he quickly escorts me to the front door, shame and guilt wash over me like a tsunami.  It may sound like a typical one-night stand — except this is a Monday MORNING and the man I just bedded is an important client.  Fifteen minutes earlier, I turned up at his house looking every inch the respectable estate agent.  Wearing a pinstripe suit and high heels, I’d hoped to impress Mr Lawson* so I could look after the sale of his property.  But five minutes in, we were together on the kitchen floor. Mr Lawson — who is old enough to be my father — fiddles with his wedding ring as he mutters about how he’ll be in touch.  I know he won’t, of course. How do I know? Because this isn’t the first time I have been in this horrid situation at work.  I wish I could say this reckless behaviour is out of character. But I would be lying.  The reality is this: I am a sex addict and Mr Lawson is just one of several men I have slept with this week.  My addiction affects every aspect of my life. Even at work, I am not safe. Having keys to vacant properties means I always have somewhere to take sexual partners.  For years, I have battled with my dirty secret. Like a parasite, it has eaten away at my soul and destroyed my life.  I have had to leave jobs after bedding my boss, landlords, caretakers and even tenants.  I tried to uncover why I feel this constant need for attention and dangerous sex.  I even piled on pounds so men won’t find me attractive. But nothing works. I can’t tell anyone. Who would understand?  I don’t have many girlfriends because I am worried I would sleep with their partners.  My long-term boyfriend has no idea about my double life. He is a good man from a religious family.  Trust is everything to him and the truth would kill him. He thinks I have slept with just one other man. In reality, I have lost count of my previous lovers.  The figure runs into hundreds, as do my lies.  One time, I popped into a supermarket on my lunchbreak to pick up a sandwich.    I started chatting with a good-looking worker who was stacking shelves. The next minute, I was in the stockroom with my knickers round my ankles.  I went back to work with my tights ripped and lipstick smeared all over my face. I looked such a state that colleagues thought I had been mugged.  My boss sent me home early and as soon as I got in, I had a long shower to wash away my sins.  As my boyfriend was home, I turned up the pressure so he wouldn’t hear me sobbing. Last year, I had unprotected sex with a tenant I was showing around a one-bedroom flat.  Shortly afterwards I found out I had chlamydia. I had to tell my boyfriend something — so I lied and said I caught the infection from a festival loo.  Luckily, he believed me and went to his GP for meds. I hated myself for putting his health at risk.  Desperate to change, I went to my doctor for help. She looked at me like I was a piece of dirt on her shoe but promised to refer me to a counsellor.  For the first time in years, I felt hopeful as I waited to go in for the initial session. But as soon as I sat down on his couch, I knew we would end up sleeping together. And after five sessions, we did.  I could have complained and got him struck off. After all, he had abused his position of trust.  But if I told anyone the truth, they would discover the real me — and I couldn’t let that happen.  So I continue to live with this dark secret. It follows me around every day like a bad dream.  There is nothing fun or glamorous about sex addiction. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.  LINDSAY LOHAN: An ex-boyfriend called the actress, 33, who has battled numerous demons, a “nymphomaniac” and “insatiable” in bed.  RUSSELL BRAND: The comic, 44, admits he was a “charging locomotive” and is said to have once bedded 80 women in a single month.  CHARLIE SHEEN: The actor, 54, says his addiction ruined his life and gave him HIV. One ex says he brought a hooker to a Thanksgiving dinner.  MICHAEL DOUGLAS: The actor, 74, admits to alcohol and sex addictions in 2012 and went into rehab. His first marriage ended due to serial adultery.


vox--2019-10-31--She lost her son to addiction, then lost her house to save her daughter

Share All sharing options for: She lost her son to addiction, then lost her house to save her daughter  In 1983, Nan Warren’s first daughter died at the age of 2 of congenital anomalies. In 2005, Warren lost her first son to a heroin overdose.  In the decade and a half that followed, Warren has fought to prevent the same fate for her surviving daughter, Erin Kane, who was addicted to alcohol. But Warren struggled, constantly wrestling with insufficient health insurance coverage, and was unable to pay the amount treatment facilities charged, which could range in the tens of thousands of dollars.  “I read your article about the family who spent $200,000,” Warren, 65, told me. “The difference between them and me is that I have never had $200,000 I could spend.”  Warren said she’s spent more than $40,000, including the cost of travel and related expenses, to get Erin to addiction treatment. To pay for that, Warren had to refinance her house, eventually sell the home, load up her credit cards, and tap out an inheritance from her father and the rest of her savings. Her daughter has suffered financial consequences as well: Warren estimated Erin is at least $60,000 in debt — and may need to file for bankruptcy to get out of it.  The good news is Erin, who’s now 33, hasn’t had a drink since March 2017. But living with her mom near Raleigh, North Carolina, she still struggles with an eating disorder — only recently finding a therapist who takes Medicare, which she’s on due to a disability, to help with that.  Meanwhile, Warren, who is looking for work, estimated she has “about three more years. Then, I would have less money than it would cost me to live anywhere I can think of living.”  Warren is one of more than 800 people who have contacted Vox for our Rehab Racket project, which is investigating the high cost and poor quality of the US’s addiction treatment system. Some patients and parents, spouses, siblings, and friends have told us stories about paying tens of thousands of dollars — or even hundreds of thousands — for addiction treatment.  But others haven’t been able to afford treatment to begin with or have gone down a path of financial ruin in a desperate effort to save their loved ones.  The opioid epidemic in America has led to a record number of overdose deaths — including more than 70,000 in 2017, the latest year of full data. Some of these deaths could have been prevented with addiction treatment, which, when evidence-based, can and does work. But only 1 in 10 people with a drug addiction obtain specialty care.  Based on the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, federal researchers estimated that roughly 314,000 people in the US in 2018 needed drug addiction treatment but couldn’t get it because they did not have health coverage and could not afford the costs. About 100,000 couldn’t get it because, while they had health coverage, it did not cover treatment at all or, at least, the full cost. (There’s some overlap between the groups because participants were able to select multiple responses.)  Because of the financial problems and inability to find affordable treatment, Erin for years had to deal with an untreated alcohol addiction and eating disorder, jail time, and bouts of homelessness. Warren lived in constant fear over what would happen to her daughter, while taking time off work and draining her finances to try to find help. They both now must face lingering financial consequences, from a lost home in Warren’s case to potential bankruptcy in Erin’s.  While things have gotten better for Erin, Warren is still worried about her own future — and if she will end up broke and homeless.  “I look at the ladies pushing their shopping carts,” Warren said. “And my kids will go, ‘Oh, mom, we’ll never let that happen.’ And I go, ‘Well, I don’t know. I can’t trust that.’ Half my children are dead. How do I know I can count on anybody?”  After Warren’s first daughter died in 1983, she poured her time and attention into her son, Alex Kane, who was four months old at the time. She eventually had two more kids, in 1985 and 1994. In 1991, she left behind her full-time career as a lawyer and became a stay-at-home mom. For a while, things were good, as the family lived happily in Newport News, Virginia.  Then Alex, who Warren described as “practically an Olympic-level swimmer,” injured his shoulders during practice, and he was prescribed opioid painkillers around 1998. He then misused the painkillers and, eventually, heroin. In 2001, Warren said, “I found him passed out on the floor with a belt around his arm in his bedroom the first time when he was 18.”  Alex didn’t want to get into treatment, but he eventually stopped using drugs in 2003 and went to college for the 2004-05 school year, getting a 4.0 GPA. Then when technical problems with his student loans led to him missing the first day of classes the following school year, Alex relapsed — dying of a deadly heroin overdose in August 2005.  Alex’s death broke Warren, leaving her unable to do much for a year and a half. “There was literally nothing I could do, except hold myself together for my [surviving] son,” she said. (Her son didn’t want to be part of this story.) “I took him to all his school things and soccer, did all those things for him, and then when he was not there, I sat there and stared across the room.”  The two drifted apart when Alex first started using drugs. Erin described herself as a “goody two-shoes” in high school — a champion swimmer with good grades, who told friends she “was never going to drink alcohol.” But once Alex stopped using drugs, and after Erin first got treatment for her eating disorder during her senior year of high school in 2003, the two reconnected.  Then Alex died. With the combination of college life at George Mason University and Alex’s death, Erin began to drink a lot more. Soon, she was drinking daily.  Part of the alcohol addiction, Erin explained, was a “vicious cycle” with her eating disorder, which leads her to binge eat and then purge. Alcohol would tame her eating disorder, but then she would feel she hadn’t eaten enough. So she’d binge eat, and feeling bad about that, she would purge. Then she’d drink more, hoping to tame her eating disorder again.  In December 2007, Erin told her mom that she woke up every morning and shook until she had a drink. “She immediately wanted treatment,” Warren said. “And she wanted treatment for everything — the eating disorder and alcoholism.”  The family first tried going to hospitals, believing that they could help treat Erin. By that point, she was suffering from seizures and hallucinations caused by delirium tremens, the most severe form of alcohol withdrawal.  “The first time, I was in a hospital. I had a grand mal seizure right in front of [my mom],” Erin said. At the hospital, “I remember thinking there were animals in the room with me. I was convinced. I told my mom I wanted to get rid of them. Finally, I got the nurse to come in and accused her of hiding the animals. It was just scary.”  The hospital trips didn’t help, but Warren in the summer of 2008 found the Ridgeview Institute in Smyrna, Georgia. Erin liked the program, which treated both her alcohol addiction and her eating disorder with a mix of cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and other group sessions. She spent three months there, shuffling between inpatient and a halfway house. But it cost at least $75 per day, and eventually her family couldn’t afford it anymore.  Erin had insurance through Anthem at the time, which Warren first bought on the individual marketplace for around $40 a month just for Erin. (The plan was too expensive for Warren, who went without insurance.) This was before the Affordable Care Act regulated individual market plans, and the insurer was resistant about paying for addiction treatment for long. It would pay for a few days of treatment at a time, if it paid at all.  In response to questions about Erin’s coverage, an Anthem spokesperson wrote in an email, “Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield is committed to providing our customers access to high quality, cost-effective healthcare services when needed, including treatment for substance use disorders. While Ms. Kane was an Anthem customer from 2008 to 2013, all health plan benefits were administered correctly and consistently per her chosen benefit plan.”  After Erin left Ridgeview, she and her family continued to try to find longer-term care — preferably inpatient — but couldn’t find anything affordable. Erin ultimately went through emergency rooms, halfway houses and sober homes, outpatient treatment, and brief stints at inpatient clinics, each with their own costs. In total, Warren estimated that she spent at least $40,000 on treatment.  While the bills came in, Warren, who had previously divorced, faced problems landing and keeping a consistent job after not working full-time since 1991. “I found out nobody wanted to hire me, because of my age,” she said. “I’ve basically been doing temp work since 2002.” Nowadays, she added, “I can’t even get an interview.”  Warren eventually had to give up her house, ultimately selling it at a loss. She bought it for $258,000 in 2003, spent $62,500 on improvements and repairs after Hurricane Isabel hit that year, and sold the home, after the housing bubble burst, for $280,000 in 2012. She has some savings left, but also about $55,000 in student debt from going back to college for a master’s degree in social work to improve her job chances. She said she has no reliable plan for a full retirement or even survival past the next few years.  It’s not uncommon for families to pay a lot for addiction treatment. Previously, I spoke to the Blakes in Vermont, who paid more than $110,000 out of pocket for treatment, and the Cotes in California, who paid more than $200,000. Other families have responded to Vox’s survey claiming similar costs. But many, including Warren, have said they couldn’t afford the costs to begin with — and, like in Warren and Erin’s case, the costs led to a financial catastrophe.  Why addiction treatment is so expensive  In 2009, Erin got into another treatment facility: the Rogers Institute in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, where she again tried to get treatment for her eating disorder and alcohol addiction. “I actually loved that place,” Erin said. “I would have loved to stay there for six months to a year if they would have let me.”  But it was very expensive. According to the financial agreement Warren signed, Rogers required a $10,000 deposit for admission. The rate for each day of residential treatment was $758, adding up to more than $22,000 for a month. (This cost is not abnormal for inpatient treatment, which is supposed to be a combination of housing and around-the-clock medical care.)  Within 24 hours, Warren got the call that insurance wouldn’t cover the costs. She refinanced her home, getting about $26,000. That helped pay for a month of treatment, after which Erin left — well short of the six months to a year she said she needed. After a few months in which she struggled to get follow-up care, Erin relapsed.  Problems with insurance plagued the family as it looked for treatment. Over the years, Anthem limited how much treatment it would pay for, and at times refused to pay for care altogether, making it impossible for Erin to get the long-term help needed to recover from both alcohol addiction and an eating disorder. Warren, a lawyer by training, often had to send appeals to Anthem and regulators — leveraging technicalities and citing contract law — just to get the plan to pay for a few days of stays at sober homes and treatment facilities.  Asked about the successful appeals, an Anthem spokesperson wrote, “It is not uncommon for a consumer to seek an appeal regarding a coverage decision. In some instances, the coverage decision may be overturned as part of a thorough, multi-level appeals process that includes review by an external physician.”  Only 1 in 10 people with a drug addiction obtain specialty care.  Kimberly Kirby, a senior research scientist at the Public Health Management Corporation, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, acknowledged that behavioral treatments can be expensive for insurers. But, she added, “Who says quality addiction treatment should be cheap? It’s a complicated disease.” After all, insurance is there in part to cover all sorts of expensive services for chronic and even terminal illnesses, like heart disease and cancer.  But insurers have long resisted fulfilling such a role in mental health and addiction. A 2017 study by Milliman, a health care consulting company, found that in 2015 insurers on average paid more than 21 percent more for primary care services than behavioral services and that behavioral care was as much as 5.8 times more likely to be provided out of network than physical or surgical care.  Insurers’ resistance in this area is part of a broader historical divergence between the traditional health care system and mental health and addiction treatment, according to Sherry Glied, a health economist and the dean of New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.  “Mental health services and addiction services have historically been thought of and treated very differently from general health services by health care systems, insurance companies, everybody,” Glied told me. “There are clinical and stigma-related reasons for that, but there are also strong economic reasons for it.”  Some of the causes are straightforward: It costs insurers more money to pay for mental health and addiction treatment. But given the inconsistent quality in addiction treatment — as my own reporting has extensively documented, many addiction treatment centers reject evidence-based approaches in favor of ineffective treatments — it’s also simply harder for insurers to gauge what treatment is worth paying for and what’s not. As Glied put it, “There’s a lot more standardization in what constitutes reasonably good cancer treatment.”  So patients and families are forced to either pay out of pocket for very expensive services, racking up five- and six-figure bills, or to forgo care, like Erin did when she checked out of the Rogers Institute.  The federal government has tried to rein in this problem with parity laws, particularly the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act in 2008 and the Affordable Care Act in 2010. But the laws aren’t enforced — to the point that the White House’s opioid commission dedicated a section of its final report to calling for better enforcement of parity laws, asking that the Department of Labor get “real authority to regulate the health insurance industry” and that insurers that violate parity laws “be held responsible.”  The cost of treatment can leave families in debt and uncertainty  In 2013, Warren dropped the individual plan after the premium had grown to around $300 per month, all while the policy still refused to pay for much of the care Erin needed. The family had hoped that the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion would help. But in 2012, the Supreme Court made the expansion optional for states — and seven years later, North Carolina still hasn’t expanded its Medicaid program. Erin, however, eventually got Medicaid and Medicare after qualifying for disability assistance in 2016.  In 2015, Erin finally found help she could afford: an Oxford House, a type of sober home, in Cary, North Carolina. It cost $120 a week to live there, which Erin could pay for with a job at Starbucks she had at the time and some help from family for expenses here and there.  The house’s approach, focused on the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, worked for her, as did the rules and structure imposing a curfew and requiring her to attend meetings and maintain a job. And she got along well with the other people in the home at the time, which hadn’t happened in the past. That help her build, for the first time, a social network of people who don’t use drugs, which can be a crucial step in recovery.  And she finally managed to get medications for depression and anxiety — which “probably helped save my life,” Erin said. She remained at the Oxford House in Cary for more than a year, her longest time at any kind of addiction support service. She relapsed once after leaving but hasn’t had a drink since March 2017.  She now has an 18-month-old son, who, she said, “keeps a smile on my face” and “gives me a reason to keep going.” She’s starting part-time work as a swimming instructor, and she’s back in college, getting an associate’s degree in science that she hopes will help jump-start a career in mental health care and research.  Her mom estimated Erin has roughly $60,000 in debt from medical expenses and a credit rating in the 500s — considered “very poor.” She is facing the prospect of bankruptcy and still struggles at times with her eating disorder. But things are better than they were just a few years ago, when she dealt with blacking out, severe alcohol withdrawal, homelessness, and jail time.  For Warren, the future is bleaker. Her finances have been drained by years of trying to get her daughter into treatment, and joblessness, likely perpetuated by age discrimination, is making it hard to get to a better place. At times, she said, she can’t let herself think about her future.  “I’m so scared of what’s going to happen,” Warren said.  “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know how I’m going to make it for the rest of my life. I have no idea. I have no cushion. I have nothing to fall back on,” she added. “I’m going to live like I have for many, many years. I’m holding up a house of cards, and trying to keep the cards from falling over, and maybe I’ll get another card just when I need it.”  We want to hear from you  We’re shining a light on the problems with the addiction treatment system in America and how they’re affecting people, financially and otherwise, every day. Please help our reporting on the high cost of addiction rehab by sharing your story with us. You can also sign up for our email newsletter to get updates on the project.  If you or someone you know needs addiction treatment, you can seek help online at FindTreatment.gov or by phone at 1-800-662-4357. If you need more information, Vox put together a guide for how to find good addiction treatment.


vox--2019-12-30--1,000 people sent me their addiction treatment stories. Here’s what I learned.

Since September, I’ve asked Vox’s readers to tell me their stories about drug addiction treatment for our Rehab Racket project. In less than four months, we’ve gotten a lot of responses — now more than 1,000.  The responses range from tragic stories about overdoses and early deaths to more optimistic ones about recovery. They’ve come from all over the US, including every state and Washington, DC, and Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, South Africa, and Australia. Most of the stories come from addiction patients, although parents, spouses, siblings, and other relatives and friends of patients have sent in their stories as well.  From all of these experiences, one theme emerges: Addiction treatment in the US is expensive, hard to navigate, and far too often fails people. In the middle of an opioid epidemic that’s helped lead to more than 700,000 drug overdose deaths since 1999, America’s main defense against addiction is deeply flawed.  The stories we’ve published so far speak to these problems. Kim and Tim Blake spent more than $110,000 on treatment for their oldest son, yet much of the treatment was unhelpful and he died anyway. Michel Cote’s daughters went through $200,000 worth of treatment over a decade before they finally found something that worked for them. Nan Warren faces financial ruin after she lost her oldest son to addiction and has spent years trying to avoid the same fate for her surviving daughter.  Health insurance alone is not enough to protect patients from high costs and low quality. Maureen O’Reilly lost her son to addiction after their health insurance plan wouldn’t cover addiction care near home and he was sent to shoddy treatment facilities — some of which were later shut down — in Florida.  Most recently, Ian McLoone told me about how methadone helped him overcome opioid addiction — an example of how treatment can work if it’s evidence-based and supported, but also about the barriers McLoone faced due to the stigma and strict regulations around medications like methadone.  This is just the beginning. The Rehab Racket will last at least a year, possibly longer, and we’re less than four months in. With the end of the year approaching, though, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on what I’ve learned to this point.  Here are four lessons from the project so far — and where I plan on going next.  Just about everyone I spoke to reported at least some problems with getting addiction care covered — because they didn’t have insurance or because their insurer refused to cover the care they needed.  This is a big problem nationwide: Based on the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, federal researchers estimated that roughly 314,000 people in the US in 2018 needed drug addiction treatment but couldn’t get it because they didn’t have health coverage and couldn’t afford the costs. About 100,000 couldn’t get it because, while they had health coverage, it didn’t cover treatment at all or it didn’t cover the full cost. (There’s some overlap between the groups because participants were able to select multiple responses.)  A recent report by Milliman, a consulting company, found commercial insurance coverage of addiction treatment may be getting worse, at least relative to more conventional health care. It found that inpatient drug addiction treatment facilities were 10.1 times more likely to be out-of-network compared to medical or surgical inpatient facilities in 2018, up from 4.7 times more likely in 2013. There were similar and rising disparities for outpatient facilities too — making drug addiction treatment overall more expensive and harder to access.  Maureen O’Reilly experienced some of these problems firsthand. Her son, Ed Fahy, tried to get into addiction treatment facilities near home in New Jersey. But Horizon Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the family’s insurance plan administrator, refused to cover the programs. Fahy ultimately found addiction treatments that the health plan would cover in Florida, but there he got caught in the “Florida shuffle,” a quagmire of low-quality, weakly regulated addiction treatment centers and sober homes. He overdosed and died at a sober home that was later shut down by law enforcement.  The story reflects the problems with insurance coverage: Insurers often don’t want to pay for addiction treatment that can be fairly expensive, and they also don’t know what’s good care that’s worth covering.  O’Reilly is now suing Horizon and its behavioral benefits manager, Beacon Health Options. Horizon said in a statement that “the claims being made in [O’Reilly’s] lawsuit are untrue, unfounded, and unfair.” Beacon declined to comment.  O’Reilly is not alone. While reporting her story, I spoke to other family members of addiction patients who sued insurers. Some of these families have landed big public victories: In Wit v. United Behavioral Health, a federal court found United had illegally denied mental health and addiction treatment coverage to tens of thousands of patients. The ruling will likely be appealed, but if it succeeds, it could set a precedent for the industry.  Insurers, at least, seem to be aware of a problem. Many of them, including Horizon, Beacon, and United, have teamed up with the advocacy organization Shatterproof to develop better standards for addiction care.  All of this helps explain why US drug addiction treatment can be so expensive: Insurance is the system that’s meant to shield Americans from huge health care expenses, but it’s often not doing that for addiction care.  2) We know disturbingly little about addiction treatment in America  While reporting on addiction treatment in the US and asking experts about the evidence for addiction care, there has been one answer I’ve gotten used to hearing a lot: “I don’t know.”  It was a common response when I asked if certain addiction treatments worked. Many facilities, for example, now use equine therapy, in which patients connect with horses. But we have next to no research on whether this works. The same is true for wilderness therapy that emphasizes outdoors activities, which also has little reliable scientific evidence behind it.  It’s not that these methods are proven to not work. We just don’t know if they work. This is a very strange thing to occur in what’s supposed to be health care: Normally, treatments follow evidence. Patients usually don’t want doctors trying a bunch of stuff on them and hoping something works out.  But the lack of evidence for effectiveness is largely standard in addiction treatment. The vast majority of treatment facilities don’t even track real outcomes for what they do. Some of these facilities claim to do so, but they usually only use follow-up surveys that are riddled with bias and errors; for example, a patient can claim he hasn’t used drugs, and the survey taker will make no effort to actually verify that.  This is not just a failure of the industry, but of the law and regulators as well. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services “has over 4,000 quality measures,” Tami Mark, a health economist at the research foundation RTI International, previously told me. “There are none for addiction programs — zero.”  At the same time, we have little indication about what kind of financial impact addiction treatment is having on American families. There’s just not much research on it.  Mark, along with the advocacy group Shatterproof, is now undertaking an effort to fix that by creating a sort of “Yelp for rehab” that will try to guide patients to evidence-based care with the use of provider surveys, insurance claims, and user evaluations, starting next year in at least some states.  For now, though, patients are largely left in the dark about whether a treatment facility really is following the evidence.  3) We don’t make good use of what we do know about addiction treatment  There are, however, some things we know about addiction treatment. The problem is we don’t make good use of this information.  For example, the research shows that medications for opioid addiction — methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone — are very effective: Studies show they cut the mortality rate among opioid addiction patients by half or more and keep people in treatment better than non-medication approaches.  Yet in the US, the majority of addiction treatment facilities don’t offer any medications. According to federal data, only 42 percent of the nearly 15,000 facilities tracked by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) provide any type of medication for opioid addiction. Less than 3 percent offer all three federally approved medications.  In fact, treatment centers may even discourage the use of medications due to the mistaken belief that the medications are simply replacing one drug with another. Ian McLoone said one of the rehabs that he went to, RS Eden in Minnesota, pushed him to get off methadone. It was only thanks to an intervention from his mom that McLoone agreed to stay on it.  That “was by far the best decision I could have made,” McLoone said. “Then, I was able to finish rehab, get a job shoveling asphalt that summer, working my ass off. I got into grad school. I got through grad school. And I was able to really have the life and the family and the career that I had dreamed of. Methadone absolutely facilitated that and helped to make that possible.”  The hurdles to evidence-based treatment reflect not just the industry’s decisions but public policy choices too. Needle exchanges have decades of evidence behind them and support from the American Medical Association, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and World Health Organization, but they remain illegal in much of the US. Prescription heroin, in which people with treatment-resistant addiction are provided heroin, is supported by major studies — including an extensive review of the research by the RAND Corporation — but it’s received next to zero attention from US policymakers.  The point here is straightforward: If we don’t even use what we know works, then we’re not going to get very far in addressing the opioid crisis or addiction in general.  When writing about anything addiction-related, there’s an explanation I can expect for just about any problem: stigma. Indeed, it’s the thing that ties the lessons on this list together.  This has stuck with me ever since I went to Vermont in 2017 to see how the state built up its addiction treatment system. When I asked officials about the hurdles to building up the new system of care, I expected to hear a lot about money (a common problem in policymaking). But officials told me, in fact, that money wasn’t that big of a deal. Instead, the main barrier was stigma around addiction, fueled by the notions that addiction is a moral issue — not a health issue — and people with addiction don’t deserve public resources. Once that stigma was overcome, the money came easily.  As I’ve written before, this is the core problem with how the US approaches drug addiction in general. It’s the lasting impact of the country long treating addiction as a moral failure — one that was relegated largely to the criminal justice system to handle — instead of a medical condition that warrants public health resources.  I’ve heard the same, time and time again, with the Rehab Racket project. Why don’t we know much about addiction treatment facilities and their outcomes? How can addiction treatment remain so expensive and so ineffective for many? Why don’t we use the evidence we do have for treatment? Why don’t insurers adequately cover addiction treatment? There is one common answer: Stigma leads to a skewed perception of addiction, or apathy about it, so the public, policymakers, and other actors don’t do enough to change the status quo.  “We’ve had these problems for a very long time,” Keith Humphreys, a drug policy expert at Stanford, told me. “I’ve heard politicians making speeches about, you know, outrage that people with heart disease are waiting in the [UK’s National Health Service] or the quality of cancer care or the dirty conditions at Walter Reed. I have never heard a politician say, ‘I am outraged at the quality of alcoholism care in our community. This is not acceptable.’ Never. I mean, it’s almost unthinkable.”  That’s how these problems keep going: Until enough people overcome their stigma toward addiction, they’re not going to give the problem the attention it requires to solve.  One bit of good news is that a lot of people are ready to combat this stigma. The fact Vox has received more than 1,000 responses to its survey, with most including their full names and personal information, demonstrates as much.  The Rehab Racket project will last well into 2020, and the responses my editors and I have gotten to our survey have given us several leads and ideas we want to continue exploring.  One story I’ll tackle soon is the dominance of the 12 steps. This treatment approach, built around the teachings of Alcoholics Anonymous, is helpful to some, and it has solid empirical approach when it comes to alcohol addiction. But there’s not solid evidence for it when it comes to other kinds of drugs, and some people don’t like the approach at all — yet it’s often what’s foisted on patients in American addiction treatment.  Emilie and Danika Cote, for instance, previously told me that they didn’t like the 12 steps’ emphasis on submitting to a “higher power.” As Emilie, who’s “not religious at all,” said, “I had a really hard time with the whole God thing.” Danika agreed.  But it took roughly a decade for them to finally find a treatment clinic that didn’t drive them to the 12-step approach and that they otherwise liked.  I’ve heard similar things from dozens, if not hundreds, of other patients. Why is that? And what can be done about it?  Another is the financial problems surrounding methadone treatment. Methadone is one of the most well-studied treatments for opioid addiction, with strong evidence behind it. But I’ve now heard from multiple patients that insurance doesn’t cover it, or methadone clinics will refuse insurance — leading to costs that can be as high as $600 a month. Given that some patients can take methadone indefinitely, the cost can add up very quickly. I want to figure out why that is, especially given that, as journalist Alison Knopf has written, methadone itself can be less than $1 a dose.  Finally, I’d like to zoom in on some of the more specific issues in addiction treatment. That will involve shining a light on bad actors in addiction treatment and holding them accountable, but also digging into the examples of addiction treatments that do work and what they involve.  One of the outrageous things about the failures I’ve uncovered so far is that we know that drug addiction treatment can work when it’s evidence-based, accessible, affordable, and flexible. This makes all of the problems in the field even more inexcusable. Hopefully, by putting a spotlight on the places that are getting things right, we can help set an example that the rest of the industry and policymakers can follow.  We want to hear from you  We’re shining a light on the problems with the addiction treatment system in America and how they’re affecting people, financially and otherwise, every day. Please help our reporting on the high cost of addiction rehab by sharing your story with us. You can also sign up for our email newsletter to get updates on the project.  If you or someone you know needs addiction treatment, you can seek help online at FindTreatment.gov or by phone at 1-800-662-4357. If you need more information, Vox put together a guide for how to find good addiction treatment.


wakingtimes--2019-01-10--Is Addiction the Result of a Lack of a Sense of Purpose in Life

Is Addiction the Result of a Lack of a Sense of Purpose in Life?

As you are no doubt aware, presently the United States is experiencing an opioid epidemic. There are many reasons for this—one of the most obvious being the reckless over-subscription of opiate-based painkillers by doctors, leading to dependency. But on a psychological level, we have to take into account the strong relationship between addiction and the lack of a sense of purpose.  To some extent, addiction is the result of a lack of purpose. It’s partly the consequence of experiencing what the psychologist Viktor Frankl called the ‘existential vacuum’—feeling as though there is no purpose or meaning to your life. With a strong sense of purpose, we become very resilient, able to overcome challenges, and to bounce back after setbacks. We are also better able to deal with—and perhaps more motivated to overcome – the painful effects of past trauma. We never wake up in the morning with no reason to get out of bed. Life seems easier, less complicated and stressful. Our minds seem somehow tauter and stronger, with less space for negativity to seep in.  But without a sense of purpose, we are more vulnerable to becoming depressed in response to negative events. We become more susceptible to psychological discord—to boredom, frustration and pessimism. We are more liable to feel the residual pain of trauma from the past (and traumatic past experiences in themselves have also been linked to addiction). Drugs and alcohol are therefore appealing as a way of escaping the psychological problems caused by a lack of purpose. But addiction can also be seen as an attempt to find a purpose. After all, when a person becomes an addict, their lives take on a very strong sense of purpose: to satisfy the addiction. I have often heard addicts describe how life simple life becomes in addiction. There is always a clear goal in your mind and a motivation behind every moment of your existence. Everything else is secondary to the overriding purpose of feeding your addiction.  And just as there is a relationship between addiction and a lack of purpose, there is a relationship between recovering from addiction and gaining a new sense of purpose. Research has shown that, without a new sense of purpose, recovery does not tend to last. The stronger and more established a person’s sense of purpose is, the greater chance they have of remaining sober. Partly this is because there has to be something to replace the sense of purpose provided by the substance, otherwise a person is likely to return to that purpose. At the same time, a new sense of purpose can provide the resilience needed to overcome the challenges that arise with new sobriety.  In my view, the present-day prevalence of addiction is a least in part symptomatic of a crisis of purpose in secular Western culture. It’s partly the result of a sense of disorientation and frustration due to the lack of the availability of fulfilling, purposive modes of living. The primary purpose that our cultures offer is what you could call a ‘self-accumulative’ purpose. We are encouraged to think of happiness in terms of acquisition and achievement. We try to get as many qualifications as we can so we can get good jobs, earn good money, buy possessions and pleasures, and slowly work our way up the ladder of success. But it’s not surprising that so many people find this type of purpose unfulfilling. After all, there is very little evidence that material success and professional achievement contribute to personal wellbeing. And due to the fact that success and wealth are limited commodities, there is a great deal of competition for them. It’s easy for people to fall behind, to lose motivation, or even to fall off the ladder altogether.  Another possibility is a religious purpose. Religion is appealing to many people because it does provide a strong sense of purpose and meaning. However, taking on a religious purpose usually involves accepting questionable and irrational beliefs, and subsuming one’s individuality and intellectual independence within a pre-given framework, which is difficult for many of us to do. As a result, religion offers only limited help.  To my mind, therefore, large-scale problems with substance abuse are an inevitable result of a culture that is ‘purpose deficient.’ It’s clearly essential to take appropriate social and political measures, such as reducing the availability of prescription opioids and funding recovery programs, but at the same time—from a longer-term perspective—we need to encourage the adoption of more satisfactory and fulfilling types of purpose, beyond self-accumulation and religion.  In a research project at my university, we studied the effects of different types of purpose and found that an altruistic and a ‘self-expansive’ purpose were much more strongly associated with well-being. (By ‘self-expansive’ we mean that a person’s sense of purpose is to grow, to expand themselves and their horizons, and to fulfill their potential. This often means following a creative path, or a path of personal or spiritual development.) Altruism is much more fulfilling than self-accumulation because it connects us to other people, and helps us to transcend a self-centered preoccupation with our own desires or worries. Altruism is also non-material, and therefore limitless. We don’t need to compete against each other for kindness. A self-expansive purpose is so fulfilling because it gives us a sense of dynamic movement, with feelings of flow and accomplishment and meaning.  So in order to transcend our present state of purpose deficiency (and so transcend the psychological discord that so easily leads to addiction), there ought to be a cultural movement to encourage the adoption of these different types of purpose. Rather than encouraging consumerism and competitiveness, we should be encouraging altruism, creativity and spirituality. Perhaps most of all, this should begin with an overhaul of education systems, which tragically neglect these areas, in favor of training pupils and students for a treadmill of unfulfilling striving.  Unless this happens—whilst it may be mitigated by social and political changes—the tragic specter of addiction will always hover over us.  Steve Taylor Ph.D is a senior lecturer in Psychology at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. He is the author of Back to Sanity: Healing the Madness of Our Minds and The Fall: The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and the Dawning of A New Era.  Steve’s books have been published in 16 languages and his research has appeared in The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, The Journal of Consciousness Studies, The Transpersonal Psychology Review, The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, as well as the popular media in the UK, including on BBC World TV, The Guardian, and The Independent.


wakingtimes--2019-08-02--Addiction Expert Claims Giving Your Child A Smartphone Is Like Giving Them A Gram Of Cocaine

Addiction Expert Claims: Giving Your Child A Smartphone Is Like Giving Them A Gram Of Cocaine

The world is changing at a dramatic pace. It’s shifting so fast, in fact, that the childhood you remember is vastly different than the one your own kids will experience. This is largely due to the development and saturation of technology in modern society.  While there are perks to being hyper-connected, allowing children access to their own smartphone could produce detrimental effects long-term. It’s so influential, top addiction therapist Mandy Saligari suggested in 2017 that giving your child a smartphone is like “giving them a gram of cocaine.”  Speaking at an education conference in London, the Harley Street rehab clinic specialist explained that Snapchat and Instagram can be just as dangerously addictive for teenagers as drugs and alcohol. As a result, they should be treated and regulated as such. Saligari said screen time is often overlooked as a potential vehicle for addiction in young people.  “I always say to people, when you’re giving your kid a tablet or a phone, you’re really giving them a bottle of wine or a gram of coke,” she said. “Are you really going to leave them to knock the whole thing out on their own behind closed doors?” asked Saligari. “Why do we pay so much less attention to those things than we do to drugs and alcohol when they work on the same brain impulses?”  Her suggestion may be insulting to some people, but it follows news that children as young as 13 are being treated for digital technology. Furthermore, one-third of British children aged 12-15 admit they do not have a good balance between screen time and other activities. Considering the average American household watches television for nearly 9 hours a day, it seems everyone battles technology addiction to some extent. Perhaps we should be talking about it more.  “When people tend to look at addiction, their eyes tend to be on the substance or thing – but really it’s a pattern of behaviour that can manifest itself in a number of different ways,” said Saligari. She named food obsessions, self-harm, and sexting as examples.  Saligari, who heads the clinic in London, said around two-thirds of her patients were 16-20-years-old and seeking treatment for addiction. She noted a “dramatic increase” from even ten years ago when many of her patients were even younger.  “So many of my clients are 13 and 14 year-old-girls who are involved in sexting, and describe sexting as ‘completely normal’,” Saligari noted. The increase in “sexting” is directly linked to the normalization of using a mobile phone to send nudes. It only becomes “wrong” when a parent of an adult finds out, explained Saligari.  Mandy is an RHN, chef, writer, activist, and entrepreneur who lives in Colorado. She share healthy plant-based recipes at Life in Bloom and cannabis-infused recipes at My Stoned Kitchen.


freedombunker--2019-06-03--How Obamacare Created Massive Addiction-Treatment Fraud

One of the problems with federal hand-out programs is that individuals take advantage of them and scam artists outright loot them. You see this in programs such as Medicaid, Medicare, school lunches, earned income tax credits, housing aid, student loans, and farm subsidies.  Daily Beast writer Evan Wright has the appalling story of Christopher Bathum, who looted addiction-treatment funds made available by the Obamacare law. The law required addiction-treatment funding by Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance companies.  Addiction is, of course, a huge problem, but to me, Wright’s article indicates that the wrong solution is throwing federal money and mandates at it. The costly Americans with Disabilities Act also played a role in Bathum’s scam.  He’s a convicted sexual predator who targeted women in his care. Soon he’ll be tried for an alleged $176 million insurance fraud. He’s an exceptionally bad person, but as a businessman he was fairly typical of rehab operators in America’s $42 billion-a-year treatment industry.  His name is Christopher Bathum. Until his arrest in 2016 he ran Los Angeles-based Community Recovery, among the fastest growing rehab chains in the nation. Starting with a single treatment center in 2012, Bathum grew Community Recovery into two dozen facilities in California and Colorado, with 400 beds, medical clinics, a testing lab and a Hollywood art center and café, where patients could work and express themselves creatively.  … The most astounding aspect of Community Recovery was its price. It was free, sort of. Some were charged ten or twenty thousand dollars to enter. Many others were given scholarships. Though it turned out Community Recovery bought insurance policies for patients without telling them. To those desperate for help or a place to sleep, the details of how they got in hardly mattered. It was free enough.  The Affordable Care Act made sweeping changes to the recovery industry, which went into effect in 2012. After decades of denying coverage, insurance companies were required to pay for treatment, and at rates comparable to coverage for major illnesses. The net effect for addicts was that virtually anyone could get a policy, and it would cover up to about $3,000 per day for the first 30 days of treatment, or roughly $100,000 a month. To rehab owners, addicts, no matter how broke or hopeless, suddenly were gold mines, potentially worth up to $100,000 if they could wrangle them into treatment.  The recovery boom was on. Community Recovery was one of hundreds of new rehabs that opened in Southern California. So many popped up that the hundred-mile stretch of coastline from Orange County to Malibu was nicknamed “Rehab Riviera.” Similar booms took place in Florida and in the more ski-friendly parts of Utah. While Affordable Care made it possible to get treatment in any state, apparently many addicts when given the choice would rather try to get sober in scenic areas than in fly-over places like Pittsburgh or Omaha.  … Community Recovery was a luxury rehab for the people. Many patients lived in hilltop mansions with pools and spas. It abounded with fun activities—surfing, hiking, yoga, paintball fights, go-kart racing, zip-line adventures, and (pseudo) Native American healing sessions that Bathum led in smoke-filled teepees.  … In late 2015 LA Weekly reporter Hillel Aron published an astonishing exposé. It revealed that Bathum never finished college and faked his persona as a psychotherapist. Prior to running rehabs, Bathum had been a pool-cleaner. He had four felony convictions for committing fraud on eBay. He had a major drug problem, meth and heroin. A few weeks before Aron’s story ran, Bathum had overdosed in a Malibu motel while shooting drugs with patients. There was a photograph of Bathum being loaded into an ambulance during his overdose. Aron unearthed a lawsuit filed by a former patient from Seasons in Malibu who claimed Bathum offered her drugs in exchange for sex. Patients from Community Recovery stepped forward to say Bathum had sexually assaulted them. Some told their stories on 20/20. Bathum went on 20/20, too, and gave an absurd, seemingly methed-out interview in which he denied their allegations and claimed the photo him overdosing at the motel was a simple case of identity theft.  All of it should have led to the immediate shut-down of his rehab. Hundreds of patients remained in his care. Authorities did nothing.  … Bathum’s rehabs operated under a perverse legal loophole: he ran them as unlicensed “sober living homes.” As such, they were protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act, which included an obscure provision that gave recovering addicts status as a protected class. Their inclusion as a protected class was done to prevent neighborhoods from discriminating against recovering addicts who wanted to live together in “sober living homes.” Such homes were defined as places where no medical treatment or therapy could be offered. But since the Americans with Disabilities Act prevents state agencies from inspecting sober living homes, it’s nearly impossible to know what’s going on inside them.  … His behavior was outrageous, yet Bathum exemplified a unregulated industry. The Affordable Care Act poured money into an already broken system. Industry revenues jumped from slightly more than $20 billion to about $42 billion today.


newsweek--2019-01-23--Selficide The Dangerous New Addiction

Selficide: The Dangerous New Addiction

Extreme selfie addiction is reaching deadly proportions as people are becoming hooked on the dopamine rush that obliterates self-preservation.  Over the weekend, yet another person died by “selficide,” the term used to describe deaths caused by trying to take the perfect selfie in a risky situation. Gigi Wu, known on social media as the Bikini Hiker, was famous for posing on mountain summits in nothing but a two-piece bathing suit. On Saturday, the 36-year-old Wu  fell 65 feet into a ravine during a solo hike up Taiwan’s Yushan Mountain. While she was able to reach emergency services via satellite phone, bad weather made a rescue attempt impossible and Wu died from hypothermia. Her body was recovered on Monday.  Selficides were already in the news last weekend, when it was revealed that an Indian couple who fell to their death at Yosemite National Park had alcohol in their system. Meenakshi Moorthy and Vishnu Viswanath, who plummeted 800 feet while attempting a selfie at the park’s Taft Overlook, traveled extensively in order to document their intrepid feats. The self-described daredevil couple had a travel blog, Holidays and Happily Ever Afters, and a popular Instagram with 26,000 followers that offered photos of them perched on cliff edges and jumping from airplanes.  “Selfies are the new drug addiction and it’s an epidemic,” says New York psychotherapist Gilda Carle,  author of I’m Worth Loving! Here’s Why. “It’s a dopamine addiction and people think it’s so easy to do – because it doesn’t ‘cost’ anything… except your life.”  There’s even an exhaustive Wikipedia page devoted to selfie-related injuries and deaths.  “People do these [extreme] things for a temporary feeling of omnipotence and it is very much like a drug,” Carle said. “They may think they’re avoiding true addiction, but if they are living for the numbers on social media they aren’t living for themselves, just camouflaging the feeling of emptiness inside. They can’t sleep without checking social media numbers, they can’t get up in the morning without checking them and they are totally addicted to being loved by other people. You have to ask, ‘what is happening to our culture that we have to have the external applause to make us feel better inside about who we are?’ The whole world has become Kardashian-esque and we’re following the Kardashian lead in thinking that this [risky behavior] is the road to fame and fortune.”  How bad is the problem of selficides?  According to a report published last year in the Journal of Primary Medicine and Family Care in India, from 2011 to 2017 some 259 people died in pursuit of the perfect selfie—with the highest number of incidents reported in India, followed by Russia, the United States and Pakistan. Researchers concluded that “no-selfie zones” should be established around tourist areas, especially near bodies of water, mountain peaks and tall buildings.  Dr. Michael Brustein, another New York psychotherapist, believes the issue is exacerbated when people are on vacation. “Travel has become sort of the new status symbol. It’s the new house or car—a new outlet to express your power or freedom,” he said, adding, “And what better way to do that then by documenting it with an extreme selfie– the place, the perfect body and creating a superhero self—an exhibitionist’s need gone awry as they try to fulfill a need they can’t self-validate.” It’s a competitive arena, and your selfie has to be the best.    “We are creating the new norm which perpetuates, builds and gets crazier by the minute,” adds Brustein.  What's being done about selficides?  In India, several people have been admitted to psychiatric institutions for selfie addiction and body dysmorphia, according to India Today. In Russia, the growing number of selfie-related deaths prompted the government to launched a public-safety campaign with easy-to-decipher icons warning people not to take pictures of themselves with loaded firearms, near wild animals, in the paths of an oncoming train or while driving.  “Unfortunately we have noted recently that the number of accidents caused by lovers of self-photography is constantly increasing,” Yelena Alexeyeva, an aide to Russia’s interior minister, told The Guardian that same year. “Since the beginning of the year, we are talking about some hundred cases of injuries for sure.” They included a woman who accidentally shot herself in the head while taking a selfie with a loaded pistol (she survived), two men who tried to document themselves holding a hand grenade with the pin pulled out (they died), and a teen who electrocuted himself to death while taking a selfie on a railway track.  Making things worse is the selfie-takers own sense of infallibility, which can be contagious: “People who consume these pictures and videos and see it working out okay lose a sense of the consequences,” Carle said. “It could escalate if the consequences aren’t highlighted and people lose sight of their fragility.”  Wu seemed to acknowledge the peril in her pastime. On Christmas Eve, Wu—who claimed she spent half the year hiking the world in her bikini—posted an Instagram of her scraped and bruised legs following another fall, which she admitted she was lucky to survive.  Moorthy and Viswanath also seemed to have had a sense of the danger: Last March, Moorthy posted a picture of herself sitting on a ledge at the Grand Canyon, writing “A lot of us, including yours truly, [are fans] of daredevilry attempts of standing at the edge of cliffs and skyscrapers. But did you know that wind gusts can be FATAL? Is our life just worth one photo?"  So why did they keep risking their lives? “Once you [take risky selfies] successfully and get reinforced by social media, it creates dopamine and a neural pathway, Carle explains.”And to get it again you need to increase the dopamine. The more you do it, the more the neural pathway gets grooved and enriched and it becomes a pattern behavior. Unfortunately, it’s so dangerous you can't learn from it—because you die.”


breitbart--2019-10-02--After Years of Open Borders Sweden Unemployment Rate Approaches Highest in EU

After Years of Open Borders, Sweden Unemployment Rate Approaches Highest in EU

New Eurostat figures reveal that the country is now 24th out of 28 EU member states in unemployment levels, Expressen reports.  Löfven had set a goal in 2013 for Sweden to have the lowest unemployment rate in the entire EU by 2020. With that year fast approaching, the country’s unemployment is now near the levels of France, Italy, Spain, and Greece, the latter of which has seen systemic unemployment for years.  Expressen notes that the 2015 migration crisis has played a significant factor in the rise of unemployment. Statistics consistently reveal that migrants have a much higher unemployment rate on average than native Swedes.  Figures released in 2018 revealed that while the native Swedish unemployment rate sat at a low 3.6 per cent, the migrant proportion was 19.9 per cent, rivalling that of Greece.  Integration of migrants into the Swedish labour market has been slow going for the government and the expense of hosting large numbers of unemployable migrants is putting many local municipalities at risk of a financial crisis. Some have even openly spoken of potential bankruptcy.  The municipality of Bengtsfors petitioned the Swedish national government in August saying that they needed cash to cover the costs of taking in so many migrants and asylum seekers.  “Costs in municipalities that have received new arrivals have continued to be substantial even when government revenues have stopped. This creates a large negative hole in the municipal cash register,” Bengtsfors Moderate Party politician Stig Bertilsson said.  The municipality of Filipstad went public weeks later, stating they had similar problems covering costs of migrants. Filipstad also noted that many residents had left the area, dwindling the tax base even further.


breitbart--2019-11-01--America Added 128,000 Jobs in October, Unemployment at 3.6%

Job creation was much stronger than expected in October.  The U.S. economy added 128,000 jobs for the month and the unemployment rate rose to 3.6 percent, higher than the month before but still near a 50-year low.  Economists had expected the economy to add 75,000 jobs, with forecasts ranging between 55,000 and 155,000, according to Econoday. That unusually wide range was caused, in part, by differing views of how the General Motors strike would hit employment at suppliers and related businesses.  Unemployment was expected to tick up to 3.6 percent.  Prior months were revised upward, indicating that the labor market has been much stronger than initial reports suggested. August’s initial 168,000 was revised up to 219,000. September’s soared from 136,000 to 180,000. Those revisions brought the three-month average up to 176,000.  The strength of the labor market was even more impressive because of the drag created by the GM strike and the government shedding workers it hired to conduct the census. The manufacturing sector shed 37,000 jobs in the month, many of which economists expect will be added back now that GM workers are back on the job. The government cut back by 17,000 jobs.  The pace of average hourly earnings rose by one-tenth of a percent to a year-over-year 3 percent gain. The average workweek was unchanged at 34.4 hours.


breitbart--2019-11-01--Black Unemployment Drops to Lowest Level Ever

The unemployment rate for African Americans fell to 5.4 percent in October, the lowest level on record.  This is the third consecutive month of record-low unemployment. September’s 5.5 percent matched the record set in August.  The unemployment rate for black men hit a record low of 5.1 percent, down three-tenths from the month prior. That was lower than the previous record low of 5.2 set in December 1973.  The unemployment rate for black women was 4.8 percent, up two-tenths from September.


breitbart--2019-12-06--More Black Men Have Jobs Than Ever Before, Unemployment Rate Holds at Lowest Level Ever

The unemployment rate for black men remained at the lowest level ever in November.  The economy added 266,000 jobs in the month, far more than expected. Black men over 20 picked up 14,000 of those jobs, according to Labor Department data released Friday. That matched in increase in the civilian labor force for that cohort.  As a result, the unemployment rate for black men stayed at the all-time low of 5.1 percent hit in October.  The total number of black men employed in the U.S. rose to a seasonally adjusted 9,014,000, the highest on record. The total black male civilian labor force is comprised of just under 9.5 million individuals. The labor force participation rate held steady at 68 percent.  The unemployment rate for black women ticked up a notch to 4.9 percent but remains near its recent record low of 4.8 percent.  The combined unemployment rate for black men, women, and young people between 16 and 19 is a 5.5 percent, a tick above the all-time low of 5.4 percent hit last month.


businessinsider--2019-12-12--US unemployment claims jump to highest level since 2017

• The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits jumped by the most in two years last week. • But the sharp increase likely reflected seasonal volatility. • More comprehensive measures have pointed to a solid labor market in recent weeks.  The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits jumped by the most in two years last week, but the sharp increase likely reflected seasonal volatility.  The Labor Department said on Thursday that initial jobless claims rose by 49,000, to a seasonally adjusted 252,000, in the week that ended December 7. That was the highest level since September 2017 and compared with forecasts of 212,000 claims.  The rise was likely driven by the Thanksgiving holiday, which could have interfered with government estimates. In the previous week, jobless claims dropped to a seven-month low. The less volatile four-week moving average rose by 6,250, to 224,000, in early December.  "Claims are likely to remain erratic over the holiday," said Ian Shepherdson, the chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. "It's hard to enough to adjust monthly data, but weekly data around holidays which fall on different days of the week each year are impossible to adjust reliably."  More comprehensive measures have pointed to a solid labor market in recent weeks. In November, the economy added a robust 266,000 nonfarm payrolls and the unemployment rate fell to its lowest point in half a century.


sputnik--2019-07-31--South Africas Unemployment Rate Hits Record 29 Percent Contrary to President Ramaphosas Pledge

South Africa's Unemployment Rate Hits Record 29 Percent Contrary to President Ramaphosa's Pledge

The unemployment rate in South Africa has reached a record 29 per cent, the national statistics agency says in its latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey.  The country's President Cyril Ramaphosa and his party, the African National Congress (ANC), have come under strong criticism from opposition parties, describing the situation as an "unemployment catastrophe" and saying that the government has no clear plan to address the issue.  According to the national statistics agency StatsSA, the figure rises to 38.5 per cent if those people who have stopped looking for a job are taken into account. The youth unemployment level is over 50 per cent.  Ramaphosa came to power last year, replacing Jacob Zuma amid promises to improve the economy and attract foreign investment to boost employment. Last month, the national executive committee of the ANC set a target for Ramaphosa's government to halve the unemployment rate to 14 per cent within five years.