Addiction is not something that only happens to other people’s children, somebody else’s ex-wife, or that neighbor kid who was always bad news anyway. It’s them, yes, but it’s also me, and you, an our kids … it’s all of us. Addiction is not an affliction saved for the weak-willed or weak-minded; the underachieving or the undereducated—it’s not looking to plant roots in the sketchiest among us any more than it seeks to sink its hooks into those of us who proclaim to be shiny and upstanding.
Being hooked isn’t anybody’s end game.
The word itself: hooked … it’s what we do to fish before gutting and consuming them. It’s being connected to a foreign object via your flesh. Addiction is a wide mouth bass with a metal piercing personified. It’s not what anybody wants.
Drugs and alcohol have never cared for who you are or what you do. If you’re consuming this or that and your brain lights up like a Christmas tree, then, it’s on. If the this or that that’s being consumed happens to be heroin, and that heroin happens to be laced with Fentanyl, it doesn’t really matter if the user got hooked after taking Oxycontin to treat a sports injury (these are the “sad, able-to-have-sympathy-for-the-addict” tales), or if the person started shooting heroin because they were surrounded by other people shooting heroin and that’s just what they decided to do (these are the “what-a-sad-sorry-way-to-live” tales). Both are tales as old as time, and as equally rampant and deadly—the crisis is a fitting term.
The socio-economic, political and public health issues are vast, but those are topics for another day. Today is about options. For many, Medication-assisted treatment (MAT) is a good one. It can be the beginning of the end of the cycle and spur a lifetime of working to find healthier ways to live and cope.
MAT with Freedom Healthcare Services isn’t the only game in town. They do not have the market cornered on treatment, but they do provide a compassionate, multi-tiered approach to recovery for those for whom in-patient or intensive outpatient treatment isn’t a workable solution. For those who have tried and failed to quit cold turkey and “Just Say No,” MAT can be a “baby step” to freedom from that helpless, hopeless hook that every addict knows well.
If you or someone you love wants to learn more about MAT, please call Freedom Healthcare Services at 412-453-8554, or use our contact form.
Look for more addiction and recovery topics from our experts soon.
