“In the most health-obsessed society ever, all is not well,” wrote addiction expert Gabor Maté in The Myth of Normal in 2022. “Multibillion-dollar industries bank on people’s ongoing investment—mental and emotional, not to mention financial—in endless quests to eat better, look younger, live longer, or feel livelier, or simply to suffer fewer symptoms.” We do our best to keep up, Maté wrote, and yet our collective health is deteriorating!
Blanchard founder and CEO Ward Blanchard made a similar point in a recent webinar. In the Blanchard Family Workshop, he presented the United States as the country with the seventh worst stress record in the world—between Sri Lanka and Uganda. And the stress and despair translate into substance misuse and other unhealthy behaviors. “The US is the most obese, addicted, medicated, indebted adult society ever, consuming 90 percent of the world’s pain medicines,” Blanchard said.
“How are we to understand that in our modern world, at the pinnacle of medical ingenuity and sophistication, we are seeing more and more chronic physical disease as well as afflictions such as mental illness and addiction?” asked Dr. Maté in his book.
He believes that behind the “entire epidemic of chronic afflictions, mental and physical, that beset our current moment, something is amiss in our culture itself, generating both the rash of ailments we are suffering and crucially, the ideological blindspots that keep us from seeing our predicament clearly, the better to do something about it.”
Loneliness is a major element of this epidemic. “We live in a world where we don’t have time for community,” Blanchard told the webinar audience and US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned last year that “widespread loneliness in the US poses health risks as deadly as smoking up to 15 cigarettes daily.”
Getting a better understanding of the complicated interplay of mental health conditions and addiction to be better able to help other people is one of the main goals of the Family Workshop. Because addiction is a complex disease, Blanchard wanted The Blanchard Institute to be more than just a treatment clinic. “Right from the start, we wanted it to be a community resource, a teaching site, and general wellness center as well,” he says. The workshop is part of that effort.
Another major driver of addiction is chronic stress, especially in the form of unprocessed trauma. “Early life stress and child maltreatment, chronic cumulative adversity, major life trauma, and negative emotionality and impulsivity/sensation-seeking traits are each associated with increasing levels of drug use and abuse,” wrote Rajita Sinha in the journal Biological Psychiatry in 2009.
“If we do not process trauma, ongoing life complications such as depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances, anger, feelings of betrayal, and trouble trusting and connecting in relationships can persist for years after the traumatic experience occurred,” wrote Tian Dayton, PhD, in Trauma and Addiction. “Such are the symptoms that, when unresolved, lead people to seek pleasure or self-medicate with alcohol, drugs, food, sex, spending, and other addictions.”
Loneliness, disconnection from a life of purpose, and relentless stress have had a devastating impact on too many Americans. Modern addiction treatment needs to address all of these factors and treat the whole person and their social environment to be effective.
Treating co-occurring disorders such as depression, anxiety, and trauma successfully is not easy but with the help of caring professionals, it can be accomplished. The Blanchard Institute offers a wide range of comprehensive, individualized outpatient treatment programs for substance use and mental health disorders, including outpatient detox, partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient, and outpatient treatment.
We use a dual-diagnosis approach to diagnose and treat both the addiction and any co-occurring mental health disorders, using a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy, medication management, group therapy sessions, and family therapy sessions.
Our admissions process is discrete, confidential, and non-invasive. Call us at 704) 288-1097—our experienced admissions specialists will guide you through the process and treat you with the dignity and compassion you deserve.