-
Watch “The Australian sled dogs keeping tradition alive | ABC News”
-
Handout: Characteristics of people in your life
Here is a simple and potentially deep handout. It developed out of a process conversation in Mens group when I asked who was the first person to turn you onto drugs or alcohol. From that question and conversation came the next which was what character traits did that person have. After many Mens groups it eventually developed into the handout below. Sometimes I combine who first turned you on with other people who had an influence. Sometimes I add: what characteristics does a person in recovery have, or what are your characteristics?
Ideally this is a conversation, but if your group is not open to sharing than I hand out a sheet with the questions and folks write out their answers and than we share.The Handout: List four people in your life that have had an influence, affect, change. Two positive and two negative. What aspects stood out in their characteristics; (respectful, kind, stingy, generous, loner, peple person, ect).
-
My Most Listened to Songs of 2022: Jake Xerxes Fussell: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert” on YouTube
-
When are people homeless
People are homeless when they lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence. This includes those living in emergency shelters, transitional housing, or places not meant for habitation, such as an abandoned building.
In the United States, there are over half a million people experiencing homelessness. The top four causes of homelessness are lack of affordable housing, relationship breakdown, substance abuse, and a previous experience of family homelessness.
Nearly three-quarters of people experiencing homelessness are adults aged 25 or older, and 18% are children under the age of 18. Other groups of people who are more likely to become homeless include people with physical and mental disabilities, people experiencing alcoholism and substance use, women, children, and youth, and seniors.
The four types of homelessness are transitional, episodic, chronic, and hidden.
-
Watch “Learning and Memory: How it Works and When it Fails”
-
More than talk
While therapists can draw upon any number of talk therapy techniques to help their clients, there are times when talk isn’t helpful or can’t be summoned. In such cases, the arts can open a back door to the psyche, drawing from individuals that which they cannot yet put into words, thus catalyzing subsequent therapeutic conversations. Creative arts therapies involve the use of the arts—visual art, music, dance and movement, drama, and poetry—to facilitate therapeutic goals.
According to photographer Marianne Gontarz York, MSW, LCSW, “Eighty percent of sensory stimuli enters through our eyes and goes into our brains where it is retained visually, nonverbally. Most of us think, feel, and recall memories not in words but in imagery. These images become a verbal language when we attempt to communicate what is going on in our mind to someone else.” The creative arts, Gontarz York says, “offer our social work clients a nonverbal way of expressing themselves and communicating their needs. These adjunctive therapies are invaluable in allowing people to express themselves when words cannot.”
In addition to facilitating communication, the arts also help clients forge relationships. “Creative arts therapies are wonderful starting grounds for building a verbal and nonverbal trusting relationship between a client and therapist and in group therapy between members of the group,” says Sally Bailey, MFA, MSW, RDT/BCT, a professor and director of the drama therapy program in the School of Music, Theatre and Dance at Kansas State University. “Working together on a project—whether that is a drama game, a mural, a song, or a group poem—creates connections that gently allow clients to reveal parts of themselves to others for a richer interpersonal knowledge.”
While creative arts therapies aren’t necessarily or entirely nonverbal, they recognize that talking isn’t always the best way to communicate, and, as a result, encourage and facilitate self-expression and active participation without depending entirely on a verbal articulation of issues. “The arts therapies provide a complement to traditional ‘talk therapies’ because they can address the full range of human experience—cognitive, behavioral, and affective domains,” says Nicholas F. Mazza, PhD, dean and Patricia V. Vance professor of social work in the College of Social Work at Florida State University. These approaches, he says, are being increasingly used in social work practice because the evidence for their usefulness has grown and been demonstrated by clinical reports and by qualitative and quantitative studies.
Arts therapies are “old human technology that has been used as long as there’s been art,” observes Shelly Goebl-Parker, MSW, LCSW, ATR-BC, program director of the art therapy counseling program in the department of art and design in the College of Arts and Sciences at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Indeed, the healing power of the arts was well known in ancient Rome and Greece.
“The arts have a long history in the practice of psychotherpy going back to the settlement house movement in the late 19th century,” Mazza says. “Through the years, the arts have been incorporated as adjunctive techniques in individual, family, group, and community practice.”
Any of the creative arts modalities may be used as a primary form of therapy or an adjunct to other modalities to improve the physical, cognitive, and psychosocial well-being of individuals with psychiatric disorders, developmental disabilities, neurological diseases, physical disabilities, and medical conditions, and may be practiced in the entire spectrum of therapeutic settings. -
My Most Listened to Songs of 2022: Lea Desandre & Iestyn Davies sing Handel: Theodora, HWV 68: “To thee, thou glorious son of worth
-
(Un)housed in paradise: how the homeless can get off the street (part 2)
-
Watch “The Neuroscience of Creativity, Perception, and Confirmation Bias | Beau Lotto | Big Think”
-
Drug addiction is complex
We’re told studies have proven that drugs like heroin and cocaine instantly hook a user. But it isn’t that simple – little-known experiments over 30 years ago tells a very different tale.
Drugs are scary. The words “heroin” and “cocaine” make people flinch. It’s not just the associations with crime and harmful health effects, but also the notion that these substances can undermine the identities of those who take them. One try, we’re told, is enough to get us hooked. This, it would seem, is confirmed by animal experiments.
Many studies have shown rats and monkeys will neglect food and drink in favor of pressing levers to obtain morphine (the lab form of heroin). With the right experimental set up, some rats will self-administer drugs until they die. At first glance it looks like a simple case of the laboratory animals losing control of their actions to the drugs they need. It’s easy to see in this a frightening scientific fable about the power of these drugs to rob us of our free will.
But there is more to the real scientific story, even if it isn’t widely talked about. The results of a set of little-known experiments carried out more than 30 years ago paint a very different picture and illustrate how easy it is for neuroscience to be twisted to pander to popular anxieties. The vital missing evidence is a series of studies carried out in the late 1970s in what has become known as “Rat Park”. Canadian psychologist Bruce Alexander, at the Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, suspected that the preference of rats to morphine over water in previous experiments might be affected by their housing conditions.
To test his hypothesis, he built an enclosure measuring 95 square feet (8.8 square meters) for a colony of rats of both sexes. Not only was this around 200 times the area of standard rodent cages, but Rat Park had decorated walls, running wheels and nesting areas. Inhabitants had access to a plentiful supply of food, perhaps most importantly the rats lived in it together.
Rats are smart, social creatures. Living in a small cage on their own is a form of sensory deprivation. Rat Park was what neuroscientists would call an enriched environment, or – if you prefer to look at it this way – a non-deprived one. In Alexander’s tests, rats reared in cages drank as much as 20 times more morphine than those brought up in Rat Park.
Inhabitants of Rat Park could be induced to drink more of the morphine if it was mixed with sugar, but a control experiment suggested that this was because they liked the sugar, rather than because the sugar allowed them to ignore the bitter taste of the morphine long enough to get addicted. When naloxone, which blocks the effects of morphine, was added to the morphine-sugar mix, the rats’ consumption didn’t drop. In fact, their consumption increased, suggesting they were actively trying to avoid the effects of morphine, but would put up with it in order to get sugar.
‘Woefully incomplete’
The results are catastrophic for the simplistic idea that one use of a drug inevitably hooks the user by rewiring their brain. When Alexander’s rats were given something better to do than sit in a bare cage, they turned their noses up at morphine because they preferred playing with their friends and exploring their surroundings to getting high.
Further support for his emphasis on living conditions came from another set of tests his team carried out in which rats brought up in ordinary cages were forced to consume morphine for 57 days in a row. If anything should create the conditions for chemical rewiring of their brains, this should be it. But once these rats were moved to Rat Park they chose water over morphine when given the choice, although they did exhibit some minor withdrawal symptoms.
You can read more about Rat Park in the original scientific report. The results aren’t widely cited in the scientific literature, and the studies were discontinued after a few years because they couldn’t attract funding. There have been criticisms of the study’s design and the few attempts that have been made to replicate the results have been mixed.
Nonetheless the research does demonstrate that the standard “exposure model” of addiction is woefully incomplete. It takes far more than the simple experience of a drug – even drugs as powerful as cocaine and heroin – to make you an addict. The alternatives you have to drug use, which will be influenced by your social and physical environment, play important roles as well as the brute pleasure delivered via the chemical assault on your reward circuits
It suggests that even addictions can be thought of using the same theories we use to think about other choices, there isn’t a special exception for drug-related choices. Rat Park also suggests that when stories about the effects of drugs on the brain are promoted to the neglect of the discussion of the personal and social contexts of addiction, science is servicing our collective anxieties rather than informing us.
RichardbBrunner 