Maureen Murdock's Blog, page 3

What Happened?-Dealing with the Bully

I’m reading Hillary Clinton’s account of her stunning loss in the 2016 Presidential election. In her memoir, What Happened, Clinton talks about the well-coordinated campaign by the Trump operatives to fuel anger throughout the country. As Trump continued to provoke violence in his rallies, she kept thinking, “People are going to be shocked by this.” But as we know, they weren’t. She hoped that at some point in the campaign people would say: “OK, what are you going to do for me”? But there was...

Drug Deaths Accelerate in 2016

Drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for Americans under 50 because of synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl and its analogues. Drug overdoses killed about 64,000 people in the United States in 2016, which is an increase of 22% over drug deaths recorded in 2015. Drug deaths involving fentanyl more than doubled from 2015 to 2016. There has also been an increase in deaths involving the use of cocaine and methamphetamines. This increase in use has caused an epidemic of drug overdoses th...

Why Aren’t Men Outraged by the Republican Effort to Strip Women of Gynecological Care and Maternity Benefits?

President Trump is the most hostile president the United States has ever had regarding reproductive rights and measures to promote sexual health. The current Republican health care plans (not dead yet) are an attack on obstetric and gynecological care showing nothing but contempt for women.

The assault includes blocking Planned Parenthood from collecting Medicaid reimbursement for a year, forcing 50% of Planned Parenthood clients to seek care elsewhere—in spite of the fact that alternative ca...

The Biggest Recovery Capital Becomes the Biggest Relapse Capital

Florida used to be the destination for college students from the Northeast to party during Spring Break. Now, the party is over. Palm Beach County, Florida has become the destination for hundreds of young people, usually under 26 years old, seeking treatment for opiate abuse. Unfortunately, in the last year alone, Palm Beach County has dealt with 5,000 overdoses.

Several treatment centers opened their doors to addicts more than 35 years ago, which spawned sober living homes where recovering a...

U.S. Deaths Soar as a Result of Opioid Epidemic

In 2015, more than 25,000 people in the U.S. died from overdosing on opioids like fentanyl, oxycodone and hydrocodone, which are either derived from opium or synthetic analogs of those narcotics. This is more than twice as many as a decade earlier, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. They now kill more Americans than homicides and are approaching traffic accidents as a cause of death. The population that suffers the most from opioid abuse is middle-aged whi...

California Prisoners Give Back

California is leading the way to help offenders re-enter society. Proposition 57 has ushered in an overhaul of the state’s prison parole system in which some inmates can earn credits to shorten their sentences for demonstrating good behavior and completing education programs. It will be possible for inmates to cut off 6 months from their sentences for earning a high school diploma or college degree and up to a month for successfully completing self-help programs like substance abuse support,...

Nothing to Hide: Exposing the Stigma of Mental Illness

Two Sundays ago the New York Times published an interview with Glenn Close and Patrick Kennedy, both of whose lives have been affected by mental health disorders.

Stage and screen actor Glenn Close, whose sister suffers from depression, started a non-profit organization, BringChange2Mind, to confront the stigma and discrimination associated with mental illness. Patrick Kennedy, the youngest child of the late Senator Ted Kennedy, has publicly acknowledged his own struggles with bipolar illness...

Grieving the End of Addiction

This is a guest post by Helen Jenkins about the stages of grief experienced by some who give up an addiction

When we force a loved one in rehabilitation to immediately be happy or pick up where they left off, we deny them the right to grieve. Systemic therapist, Lindsay Kramer, notes that drug use can be intimate in nature: “Like a new relationship, at first, the use is thrilling. There’s the high, the intimacy, the butterflies that come from anticipation of time spent together. When that t...

The Washington D.C. March

The day before the Inauguration, I went to the Newseum in Washington, DC., the dynamic interactive museum about the history of news including the printing press that printed copies of the Declaration of Independence after the hand-written original was signed. Among others, it has a fabulous exhibit about the Civil Rights Movement. Widely displayed are photos and news clippings from the 1965 March on Selma, which featured the brutal beating of John Lewis. Lewis almost lost his life that day wh...

Princess Leia Cast a Light on Bipolar Illness

Carrie Fisher did not shirk her role as an advocate for the de-stigmatization of bipolar illness. She brought the subject of bipolar into the popular culture in her writing and her one-woman show, “Wishful Drinking” where she first posited the idea of “Bipolar Pride Day.”

Ms. Fisher was first diagnosed with bipolar at age 24 but like many people who suffer from the disorder, she did not accept it until 5 years later. She spoke about her lifelong struggles with both addiction and bipolar and h...