Flourishing After Addiction with Carl Erik Fisher
36 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 months ago - ★★★★★ - 55 ratingsAddiction psychiatrist and bioethicist Carl Erik Fisher explores addiction and recovery from the widest possible diversity of perspectives: from science to spirituality, from philosophy to politics, and everything in between. He interviews leading experts in areas such as psychology, neurobiology, history, sociology, and more--as well as policy makers, advocates, and people with lived experience.
A core commitment of the show is we need more than medicine to truly understand addiction and recovery. The challenges and mysteries of this field run up against some of the central challenges of human life, like: what makes a life worth living, what are the limits of self control, and how can people and societies change for the better? These are enormous questions, and they need to be approached with humility, but there are also promising ways forward offered by refreshingly unexpected sources.
There are many paths to recovery, and there is tremendous hope for changing the narrative, injecting more nuance into these discussions, and making flourishing in recovery possible for all.
Please check out https://www.carlerikfisher.com to join the newsletter and stay in touch.
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Episodes
Stash, Sedatives and A Life In Hiding, with Laura Cathcart Robbins
March 27, 2024 16:00 - 56 minutes - 39 MBOne of the great gifts of being out in the world talking about addiction and recovery is I get to meet so many fascinating and talented people working on these issues. This is one of my deepest motivations for writing and speaking about my own experience; to connect with other values-aligned writers and thinkers. One wonderful recent example is the fantastic writer Laura Cathcart Robbins, our guest on this latest episode of the Flourishing After Addiction podcast. Laura is the author of St...
Why We Can’t Therapize Our Way Out of Addiction, with Dr. Bruce Alexander
March 05, 2024 22:00 - 47 minutes - 32.6 MBIn this episode of Flourishing After Addiction, I had the honor of speaking with Bruce Alexander, a towering figure in the field of addiction theory. As regular Rat Park readers will know, I named this newsletter after Bruce’s iconic experiment in the 1970s, honoring not just that experiment, but also the decades of contributions he’s made since to the broader understanding of addiction as a deeply human phenomenon. Now that Bruce is in his 80s, he’s said he won’t be doing much more writin...
What's Wrong? Personal Histories of Chronic Pain and Bad Medicine, with Erin Williams
February 15, 2024 11:00 - 45 minutes - 31.6 MBAs a bonus for this special episode with the artist Erin Williams, author of What’s Wrong? Personal Histories of Chronic Pain and Bad Medicine, I got permission to post some of the illustrations from her new book, What’s Wrong? Personal Histories of Chronic Pain and Bad Medicine. Head over to my Substack page to see those. You won’t want to miss them. Erin Williams is the author and illustrator of ten books, including What's Wrong? Personal Histories of Chronic Pain and Bad Medicine, Commut...
Taking Ownership of Your Recovery Journey, with Dr. Ray Baker
February 01, 2024 13:00 - 1 hour - 42.1 MBDr. Ray Baker is a distinguished leader in the field of addiction medicine and a person in long-term recovery from addiction. This episode of Flourishing After Addiction particularly resonates with the theme of the longer-form writings I’m starting to post about frameworks for making sense of recovery, so I’m grateful to have the chance to talk with him. A highlight of the conversation is Ray’s insight into the various processes of recovery, as he advocates for a holistic approach across di...
Brutalities: Exercise, Extremity, and Love , with Margo Steines
January 11, 2024 13:00 - 57 minutes - 39.3 MBIn the latest episode of Flourishing After Addiction, I am thrilled to be exploring the intricate relationships between addiction, recovery, pain, and embodiment with Margo Steines, a writer and person in recovery with a deep understanding of these themes. Margo Steines holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Arizona and serves as a faculty member in their acclaimed writing program. Her work, including her memoir-in-essays "Brutalities: A Love Story," offers a truly unique...
Shame and Self-Stigma: Strategies for Change, with Dr. Jason Luoma
December 20, 2023 20:00 - 53 minutes - 36.6 MBShame and self-stigma can be powerfully limiting and harmful, and they are especially common among people with addictions. We’ve discussed on prior episodes of the podcast that there may be valuable and wise forms of shame, but psychotherapy research has also shown that the wrong sort of relationship to shame can also inhibit growth and stand in the way of recovery. So for this episode of Flourishing After Addiction, we dive into the practical aspects of working with shame, guided by Jason L...
Navigating the Complexities of Addiction Treatment and Recovery, with Dr. Brian Hurley
December 06, 2023 20:00 - 55 minutes - 38 MBFor this episode of Flourishing After Addiction, I wanted a guest who could offer some insights into the journey of seeking help for addiction and recovery. What is going wrong with our systems and services, and where can people actually find care? Brian Hurley is the ideal person to help us with these questions, with his extensive experience as a practicing addiction physician, President of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, and Medical Director for Substance Use Prevention, Treatm...
A Buddhist Approach to Compulsive Eating, Food Addiction, and Emotional Sobriety, with Valerie Mason-John
November 15, 2023 16:00 - 56 minutes - 38.5 MBValerie Mason-John (Vimalasara) is a writer, Buddhist teacher, a person in recovery, and the founder of Eight Step Recovery. In this episode of Flourishing After Addiction, Vimalasara shares their transformative journey, beginning with childhood in an orphanage and evolving through various addictions, with a particular focus on their struggle with bulimia, to arrive at their current role as a spiritual teacher and author. Their story is a testament to the complexity of eating disorders and t...
How Not to Kill Yourself, with Prof Clancy Martin
March 28, 2023 17:00 - 1 hour - 53.6 MBClancy Martin is a philosopher, an author, a recovering alcoholic, and the survivor of more than ten suicide attempts. His new book, How Not to Kill Yourself, is a chronicle of his suicidal mind, and—of particular interest to us here—an investigation of the ways his suicidal thinking functioned like an addiction. We dive into all that and much more in this week’s episode of Flourishing After Addiction. One of Clancy's central arguments is: "thinking about killing oneself and addictive thin...
Understanding addiction through contemplative science, with Dr. Jud Brewer
February 17, 2023 18:00 - 1 hour - 43.2 MBJudson Brewer ("Dr. Jud") is a renowned addiction psychiatrist and neuroscientist who has spent over two decades studying the mechanisms of addiction and the effects of mindfulness on behavior change. On this episode of Flourishing After Addiction, it was great to talk with him about some extraordinary connections between the science of addiction and contemplative practice. We talk about Jud's own experience with panic attacks, how he found mindfulness to be a powerful tool to work with an...
Brain surgery for addiction, and finding your own path in recovery, with Zachary Siegel
December 15, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 62.9 MBZach Siegel is one of our most respected and prolific journalists on addiction and drug policy. He is also a thoughtful, introspective soul who thinks deeply about his own history of opioid addiction. In his many writings, he has often referenced that personal history, but he's never really had the chance to tell his own addiction story from start to finish. Until now! Listen to this episode of Flourishing After Addiction to hear Zach's origin story, plus a deep dive into his recent cover st...
On Psychological Flexibility and Reclaiming a Life Worth Living, with Dr. Steven Hayes
October 28, 2022 10:00 - 1 hour - 44.6 MBA little over 40 years ago, Dr. Steven Hayes experienced his first panic attack—when he was a young assistant professor in psychology, no less! In the intervening years, and drawing in part on his own recovery from panic disorder, he developed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and produced a huge body of work that has revolutionized our understanding of human language and cognition. Today, he is one of the most highly-cited scholars in the world, across all disciplines of study. And, he rema...
Heroin-Assisted Treatment, and Making Sense of Addiction, with Prof Sir John Strang
October 13, 2022 12:00 - 1 hour - 58.2 MBIn the weeks prior to this episode, the story broke that the UK’s Middlesbrough clinic, which offered a pioneering Heroin Assisted Treatment (HAT) program, is slated to close because of budget cuts. Patients were allowed to self-administer medical-grade heroin (officially, diamorphine) under medical supervision. One of the key scientific studies that supports this intervention is the RIOTT Trial—“Randomised Injectable Opiate Treatment”—and I got to speak to the principal investigator of that...
Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis, with Beth Macy
September 22, 2022 10:00 - 54 minutes - 37.6 MBAs I’ve written before, Beth Macy has an extraordinary gift for encapsulating our nation’s greatest challenges in gripping, intimate, and wise stories of everyday American struggles. She is a bestselling author of several books about addiction, inequality, and justice, and it was a great pleasure to talk to her about her latest book, Raising Lazarus, on this latest episode of Flourishing After Addiction. On a personal note, I’ve enjoyed seeing this book take shape behind the scenes, and we g...
Spirituality and justice in addiction treatment, with Dr. Ayana Jordan
September 08, 2022 16:00 - 1 hour - 46.4 MBDr. Ayana Jordan is a renowned expert in addiction and other mental health conditions, newly recruited to NYU to an endowed professorship for her fascinating research. For this episode of Flourishing After Addiction, I was excited to talk to her about new frontiers in her research, such as incorporating spirituality and health equity in addiction medicine. What I was not expecting was for her to share so openly and courageously about the way substance use problems have impacted her own famil...
From Psychoanalysis to Psychedelics: Therapy for Addiction, with Dr. Jeffrey Guss
July 28, 2022 14:00 - 1 hour - 50.6 MBDr. Jeffrey Guss sits at one of the most fascinating and unusual intersections in all of mental health: between psychoanalysis, addiction treatment, and psychedelic psychotherapy. I wanted to have someone on the show to talk more about the “paradigm-shifting” nature of psychedelic psychotherapy: what that means exactly, and at a macro level, how this kind of therapy might provide some perspective on our current paradigms, like other forms of psychotherapy or mutual help groups. I also know J...
Crafting a Life in Recovery, with Prof. Melissa Febos
July 14, 2022 09:00 - 1 hour - 45.5 MBMelissa Febos is one of our most accomplished memoirists and essayists, a passionate and fiercely honest writer who, across several of her works, has often discussed her own path through addiction and into recovery. (Among her many, many accolades, she is the recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and a National Book Critics Circle Award.) I was thrilled to talk with her on this latest episode of Flourishing After Addiction and learn more about this harrowing and inspiring part...
Transforming Addiction and Suffering with Philosophy, with Prof. Peg O'Connor
June 16, 2022 14:00 - 1 hour - 50.2 MBFrom quite early in her life, Peg O’Connor felt a “double dose of shame” - from her lesbian identity on one hand, and her struggles with alcohol on the other. Her drinking problems almost got her expelled from high school, but instead she was able to stop. In her view, philosophy helped her immensely to get and stay sober, especially considering how she was not fully on board with traditional religious views or with Alcoholics Anonymous. Peg eventually became a philosophy professor, studyin...
Many Pathways to Holistic Recovery, with Holly Whitaker
June 02, 2022 14:00 - 1 hour - 49.9 MBOne important vision I have for this podcast is to share diverse experiences of addiction and recovery. How people write about it, yes, but even more importantly, the nitty gritty of how they made sense of their own addiction and found their way to recovery. Today’s guest, Holly Whitaker, is a fierce, passionate, and incisive writer who has charted an adventurous path out of eating disorders and addiction. Holly is perhaps best known for her 2019 book, Quit Like a Woman, and she also got a ...
Healthy relationships in recovery, with Dr. Bevin Campbell
May 05, 2022 11:00 - 58 minutes - 40.1 MBTaking care of our relationships is a crucial way we take care of ourselves and the wider world. Some of the most common questions I get in my clinical practice and from listeners are questions about how to navigate relationships in addiction and recovery: couples, parents and kids, or otherwise. So I wanted to have a clinically focused episode about this important issue, and it was my great pleasure to talk with my good friend and wise colleague, Dr. Bevin Campbell, a psychotherapist who fo...
Our addiction to the self, with Dr. Mark Epstein
March 17, 2022 11:00 - 57 minutes - 39.2 MBDr. Mark Epstein is a hero of mine. He is a Buddhist psychiatrist and author who has been a voice of kindness and wisdom in our field for decades, and I’ve long looked to his work for inspiration and guidance. So it was an honor to speak with him for this episode of the Flourishing After Addiction podcast! Mark does not have a personal history of a “classic” addiction like a substance problem, but as he articulates so nicely in our interview: “from the Buddhist point of view, we’re all addi...
Why history? With Prof. Benjamin Breen
February 18, 2022 11:00 - 1 hour - 42.1 MBWith so much suffering today, and in the midst of a historic overdose crisis, you might wonder: why bother looking to the distant past of addiction? How can the history of addiction actually help us? For me, I found that I needed history to make sense of what happened to me and my family. After studying addiction for a little while, I saw that ideas dating from the origin of the global drug trade, hundreds of years ago, exert a powerful influence on how we understand and treat—or still fai...
Recovery research: Beyond abstinence, with Dr. John Kelly
February 01, 2022 10:00 - 1 hour - 43.9 MBHow do we best tap into the positive side of recovery, beyond abstinence, sobriety, and remission? What does the science actually show about growing and changing in life after addiction? There is perhaps no one better equipped to answer those questions than my guest on today’s episode of the Flourishing After Addiction podcast: Dr. John Kelly, Harvard Medical School’s Elizabeth R. Spallin Professor of Psychiatry in Addiction Medicine, and founder and Director of the Recovery Research Instit...
How to Be Loved—Writing about Addiction and Recovery, with Author Eva Hagberg
January 06, 2022 10:00 - 1 hour - 48.1 MBA lot of us folks in recovery have big collections of self-help and memoir books, and with good reason. Books give us solace, they help us see how other people deal with similar challenges, they are a source of community through contact with other minds, and, as articulated by Eva Hagberg, this week’s guest on the Flourishing After Addiction podcast, books, and particularly memoirs, are a way of trying on different “moral selves.” Eva is an author who has written beautifully about her own ...
Buddhist recovery, lovingkindness, and feeling comfortable in your own skin, with Buddhist teacher Gary Sanders
December 22, 2021 17:00 - 59 minutes - 40.8 MBAs Ram Dass once said, “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.” I’m thinking about this quote as many of us are grappling with the Omicron variant and trying to make the most of this winter break. This time of year can be hard for everyone, and I’m also thinking about all of us in recovery who have difficult family histories, for whom the holiday season might bring up difficult or outright traumatic memories. During this challenging time, I wanted to have an episo...
Self-control, the science of social psychology, and “The Power of Us,” with Dr. Jay Van Bavel
December 07, 2021 13:00 - 47 minutes - 32.8 MBWhat happens when we define ourselves in terms of group memberships? How does culture and society affect our capacity for self-control and self-regulation? Why does the toxic binary of “us” versus “them” seem to be so powerful these days? How can we instead use our shared identities to improve our wellbeing and work toward harmony and flourishing? My guest for this episode of Flourishing After Addiction is Dr. Jay Van Bavel, a social psychology researcher who studies questions like these ...
Working with the Shame of Addiction: a Philosopher's Perspective, with Prof. Owen Flanagan Jr.
November 24, 2021 12:00 - 1 hour - 46.9 MBOwen Flanagan is a philosopher who has long studied topics like consciousness, neuroscience, morality, and responsibility. But early in his career, even while racking up accolades for his pathbreaking work, drinking was already taking hold of his life. Things took a dramatic turn in the 1990s when a brain tumor and a medication reaction sent him over the edge. Today, Owen is a distinguished philosopher at Duke who is also in recovery. For the past decade or so, he’s been writing about his ...
An insider’s view of the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy case, and how to fight for change without sacrificing personal recovery, with advocate and writer Ryan Hampton
November 11, 2021 12:00 - 1 hour - 47.9 MBRyan Hampton, an alumnus of the Clinton White House, had an up-and-coming career in politics until the early 2000s, when he became addicted to OxyContin, then heroin. After he entered recovery in 2015, he became a prominent advocate on addiction issues, from community-based organizing to national activities, such as helping to release the first-ever U.S. Surgeon General’s report on addiction. More recently, Ryan came face-to-face again with Purdue Pharma—the infamous manufacturer and market...
Psychedelics for addiction and “the freedom within,” with psychiatric researcher Dr. Elias Dakwar
October 15, 2021 15:00 - 57 minutes - 39.8 MBIn mental health treatment today, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is nothing less than a sensation, and some of the most promising results are in addiction treatment. Droves of people—from researchers and clinicians to underground shamans and private funders—are hailing the re-emergence of psychedelics like psilocybin, MDMA, ayahuasca, and ketamine as a “renaissance.” But despite the hype and money being funneled in this direction, big questions remain. What do these substances actually ...
“Health in All” to prevent and treat addiction, with public health leader Dr. Wilnise Jasmin.
September 28, 2021 15:00 - 46 minutes - 32 MBFlourishing after addiction requires flourishing for all. The public health of addiction and recovery has several important lessons, not just how to respond to the overdose crisis, but also, and more concretely, how to think holistically about addiction and all the factors that support someone’s recovery. How to protect the mental health of ourselves, our families, and our broader communities, now and for generations to come. Dr. Wilnise Jasmin is a family medicine doctor and leader in the ...
“Health in All” to prevent and treat addiction, with public health leader Dr. Wilnise Jasmin.
September 28, 2021 15:00 - 46 minutes - 32 MBFlourishing after addiction requires flourishing for all. The public health of addiction and recovery has several important lessons, not just how to respond to the overdose crisis, but also, and more concretely, how to think holistically about addiction and all the factors that support someone’s recovery. How to protect the mental health of ourselves, our families, and our broader communities, now and for generations to come. Dr. Wilnise Jasmin is a family medicine doctor and leader in the ...
Mindful Recovery from Addiction, Pain, and “MORE,” with Dr. Eric Garland
September 09, 2021 10:00 - 1 hour - 41.4 MBFor decades, clinicians have used mindfulness-based interventions to treat stress, physical pain, and mental disorders. But there’s more to meditation than “mindfulness” alone, and the next wave of researchers in this field is still working out how to incorporate other practices from the wisdom traditions that gave rise to mindfulness-based treatment in the first place. Dr. Eric Garland is a clinical researcher who has devoted his life to developing a novel mind-body therapy called Mindfuln...
A Compassionate Alternative to the War on Drugs, with Maia Szalavitz
August 26, 2021 11:00 - 59 minutes - 40.8 MBRoughly 35 years ago, harm reduction saved Maia Szalavitz’s life. It was 1986 in the East Village, and though Maia was an Ivy League kid who read two newspapers a day, she had no idea that her regular intravenous heroin use put her at risk for HIV. Thanks to a chance encounter, though, Maia learned about some simple harm reduction practices that helped her stay alive through that deadly epidemic. In the years since, Maia has become an award-winning author and journalist well-known for cover...
What is recovery? With Dr. Katie Witkiewitz
August 26, 2021 11:00 - 1 hour - 42.2 MBSix percent of American adults say they are “in recovery” from a problem with alcohol or other drugs, but it’s not always clear exactly what that means. Even among researchers who study the concept, the definition of “recovery” is far from settled: does it require abstinence? does it necessarily involve lofty concepts like spirituality and citizenship? is the main point the absence of problems, or is there more to it than that? Dr. Katie Witkiewitz is a psychology researcher who, for many ...
Beyond Mindfulness: Integrating Buddhism and Recovery, with Buddhist teacher Kevin Griffin
August 26, 2021 11:00 - 1 hour - 41.8 MBThis episode’s interview is with Kevin Griffin, a Buddhist teacher who has trained with some of the leading Western Vipassana teachers—including Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Ajahn Amaro—and who himself is a leader in the mindful recovery movement. Kevin is one of the founders of the Buddhist Recovery Network, an organization that promotes the use of Buddhist teachings and practices for recovery and is respectful of all recovery paths. As we discuss, Kevin’s own path includes 12-...
Introducing: Flourishing After Addiction
August 14, 2021 22:00 - 2 minutes - 1.93 MBI'm Carl Erik Fisher, and this is Flourishing After Addiction, a new podcast exploring addiction and recovery from the widest possible diversity of perspectives. I'd love to hear from you. Please head over to http://www.carlerikfisher.com to connect.