I am open about my life in recovery. I will not be silenced, shamed, or invisible: I have a disease. And I battled my addiction alone for years. I didn't have role models, doctors, friends, or colleagues who showed me how they had struggled with addiction and succeeded to find...

If you had looked at my life from the outside growing up, it's kind of hard to imagine that one day I would find myself completely alone and hopeless wishing that I would be dead. I actually welcomed that idea at one time in my life. I was raised in a loving family. They...

My name is Mackenzie Phillips. I am Shane’s mom, I am a drug and alcohol counselor, I am a writer, singer, actress, but above all this: I am a woman in recovery from substance use disorder. Had I been asked to define myself a while back, this would not have been the way I would...

I wasn’t always an addict. My parents weren’t addicts. Their parents weren’t addicts. My aunts, uncles and siblings weren’t addicts and neither were my friends. My path to addiction wasn’t all that uncommon, but the catalyst was. April 20, 1999. I was seventeen years old and a...

The absolute last thing I wanted to be was sober. I knew it meant the end of fun, and since I thought happiness meant flinging yourself from one fun experience to the next, I considered that the end of life. Yet the crazy part of my staunch belief that sobriety was the absolute...

My name is Tim Ryan. I am a grateful recovering alcoholic and drug addict. My journey is just like many others: I let my world be taken over by drinking and drug use. I first tried heroin in 2001 and that took me down another 12-year road to hell. Many consequences occurred in...

Nearly ten years ago, I stood in a doorway with nothing but a couple trash bags of clothes, a Jeep on a car title loan, and a decision to make. Behind me were fourteen years of obsession and insanity surrounding drugs and whatever I had to do to get them. Fourteen years of...

At the end, there were only two things I cared about: the bag of heroin on my glass topped coffee table, and the cell phone next to it. They were my two life lines. After a decade of abusing opiates, I couldn’t stop using heroin. I was psychologically, physically, and...

I nearly died from alcohol poisoning when I was seventeen. It was the bottom-shelf, plastic-bottle vodka from a liquor store in Portsmouth, the kind we see discarded in alleys and not recycling bins. I was hospitalized and intubated. The nurses accidentally ruptured and...