I'm a member of AA and a past member of NA (still qualify, though), but I'm confused about dealing with AA now I'm taking Ritalin on a daily basis.

I talked to one AA friend about Ritalin, and he's supportive. He says that I seem happier these days. But I don't share this info at an AA group level or with anyone else in AA.

Several people I spoke with (outside AA) are skeptical of ADD. Then talk about taking a controlled substance and they get quite contemptuous.

AA people around here, SF Bay Area, are cool about anti-depressants. I have no problem with Ritalin and sobriety, and have been keeping it to myself until I identify members who might be helpful to me.

Anybody currently attending NA or AA? How do you deal with the prescription stimulant issue?

Cheers,

Tough question. I attended AA for 14 years until late last spring I think it was. I'm not saying that this is a good thing, I'm just saying what is.

The stimulants seem to help me a lot. I'm discovering self care in ways I never thought possible.

My sponsor had no issues with medication and encouraged me to follow my heart. I'm healthier than I've been in a very long while. I see my AA friends periodically and feel no shame about having given away my abstinence but I seem to make them uncomfortable so I don't press conversations very far.

I started my trials with stimulants 14 months ago. It's been wonderful. I still have difficulty with anger, self image and esteem but those are ongoing projects regardless of the program.

I was very worried about taking the meds and completely disregarded my diagnosis for two and a half years before the bottom finally fell out. I became willing to try then and now I'm very glad I did. As with many others, I wish I'd been prescribed in school years ago and not waited until I was in my early forties.
Cheers! Ian.

The biggest problem with the AA program is that mental disorders are not dealt with at all. It works within the paradigm that the individual is the problem and spirituality is the solution, which maybe true for people who have normal brain capacity.

Being ADD/OCD I found it impossible to work the AA program w/out medication. I've been sober 17 years, and have only made progress while on medication. I knew all the answers I just could not apply them in ordinary circumstances, and the more I tried the worse I performed. I couldn't participate in meetings because my brain would shut down, and I would completely blank out when I tried to share in meetings. And my ADD prevented me from having anything like a deep relationship with anyone.

The key for me was recognition that no program was going to work as long as my processor was disfunctional. The fundemental premise of AA is that all our problems orignate from ourselves, which is a very dangerous premise when you are dealing with real mental problems.

It's a tragedy that many people with mental illness have been told by AA that their problems were their fault, and that only God could heal them, when they clearly needed medical attention. ADD is clearly a brain dysfunction that is not a result of "self-will." This is the same type of irrational thinking as blaming sickness and mental illness on demon possession as was the case for 100's of years.

It's important to realize that ADD is a brain dysfunction which is recognised by every legitiment medical institution in the world. There is no doubt that I drank to self-medicate my OCD/ADD.

Again, I have to remember that no matter how much and how often I try to run a program in my computer, if the processor is broken the program is never going to work correctly.

Oh, and just a little AA history for you. Bill Wilson, the Co-founder of AA, was an avid user of LSD for several years, even convincing his wife and close friends to take it. At one time, he enthusastically advocated LSD in the treatment of alcoholism. He finally stopped using LSD due to his reputation and standing in the AA community.

It's also worth noting that Bill himself was chronically depressed and mostly miserable for the first 10 years of his sobriety, and who toward the end of his life still wanted a drink. I wonder how Bill would have done with modern medications, such as anti-depressants?

Check out "My Name is Bill" by Susan Cheever



By David Von Drehle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 3, 2004; Page C01

During her research for a biography of Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson, author Susan Cheever dug through the just-opened archives at Stepping Stones, Wilson's longtime home outside New York City. Alongside an archivist, she sifted reams of material that had not been looked at in decades.

One day, the archivist handed her a sheaf of wide, green-lined pages -- hourly logs kept by the nurses who tended Wilson on his deathbed.

Of Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson, Cheever says, "He changed the world without knowing it, just as a way to stop drinking himself." (Helayne Seidman For The Washington Post) Cheever glanced at them. They seemed mundane.

"Keep reading," the archivist urged her.

Cheever came to the pages covering Christmas 1970. On the eve of the holiday, Bill Wilson passed a fitful night. A lifelong smoker, he had been fighting emphysema for years, and now he was losing the battle. Nurse James Dannenberg was on duty in the last hour before dawn. At 6:10 a.m. on Christmas morning, according to Dannenberg's notes, the man who sobered up millions "asked for three shots of whiskey."

He was quite upset when he didn't get them, Cheever writes.

Wilson asked for booze again about a week later, on Jan. 2, 1971.

And on Jan. 8.

And on Jan. 14.

"My blood ran cold," Cheever said recently of the discovery. "I was shocked and horrified." With time to ponder, though, she found herself thinking, "Of course he wanted a drink. He was the one who talked about sobriety being 'a daily remission.' I realized that this was a story about the power of alcohol: that even Bill Wilson, the man who invented sobriety, who had 30-plus years sober, still wanted a drink."

In the Big Book, as AA's foundation text is known, Wilson recalled the time in 1934 when doctors concluded that he was a hopeless drunk and told his wife that there was no cure, apart from the asylum or the grave. "They did not need to tell me," he added. "I knew, and almost welcomed the idea."

On Jan. 24, 1971, the man known modestly to legions of alcoholics as "Bill W." was finally cured.

Powerless Over Alcohol

Cheever's discovery, reported in her book "My Name Is Bill," doesn't really change what little we know about alcoholism, a cruel, confounding and mysterious disease. It doesn't really change what we know about Wilson, a rough-hewn and unorthodox American saint sketched by Cheever in all his chain-smoking, womanizing, Ouija-board-reading, acid-tripping holiness.

But it might change, at least a bit, the way some of us think about miracles -- the shelf life of miracles, the limited warranty they carry, and how high-maintenance they are. Miracles come in Bill Wilson's story, but always with strings attached. They are a bequest -- but not like an annuity that pays out endlessly and effortlessly. More like an old mansion, precious and beautiful, but demanding endless, unglamorous upkeep.

The miracle of Wilson's sobriety -- and the birth of AA -- arrived like something out of the Old Testament. It was 1934, late in the year, when the doctors had given up on Bill. Booze, which once put its arm around his shoulder, now had its jaws around his throat. A smart, handsome, charming man, Wilson had become the kind of drunk who could set off one morning to play golf and awaken a day later outside his house, unsure how he got there, with his head bleeding mysteriously and his unused clubs still at his side. "The more he decided not to drink," Cheever writes, "the more irresistible drink seemed to become."

So for the third time, Wilson checked himself into a private hospital in New York that specialized in drying out "rum hounds," as he called himself. He knew what to expect: doses of barbiturates, assorted bitter herbs, castor oil and other purgatives, vomiting, tremors and depression. He also knew it probably would not work, that just about every hard case like him went back to drinking after being discharged.

The prospect was so dismal that Wilson picked up a few bottles of beer for the cab ride.

Wilson had a friend named Ebby Thatcher, another alcoholic, who had a friend named Roland Hazard, yet another drunk, who was wealthy enough to seek help from the eminent psychiatrist Carl Jung in Switzerland. When Jung realized how serious Hazard's drinking problem was, he told his patient that the only hope was a religious conversion -- in Jung's experience, nothing else worked. The American psychologist William James had arrived at a similar conclusion, declaring in "The Varieties of Religious Experience" that "the only cure for dipsomania is religiomania."

Well, by God, Hazard got religion and sobered up, for a while. He preached this approach to Thatcher, and Thatcher in turn proselytized Wilson.

"I was in favor of practically everything he had to say except one thing," Wilson later recalled of his conversations with Thatcher. "I was not in favor of God."

After a couple of days at Towns Hospital, Bill Wilson was past the d.t.'s and feeling really low. Science could do nothing for him. He now realized that he couldn't kick the booze by himself. Yet he was unable to believe in the only power experts knew of to save a drunk.

Then:

"Like a child crying out in the dark, I said, 'If there is a Father, if there is a God, will he show himself?' And the place lit up in a great glare, a wondrous white light. Then I began to have images, in the mind's eyes, so to speak, and one came in which I seemed to see myself standing on a mountain and a great clean wind was blowing, and this blowing at first went around and then it seemed to go through me. And then the ecstasy redoubled and I found myself exclaiming, 'I am a free man! So this is the God of the preachers!' And little by little the ecstasy subsided and I found myself in a new world of consciousness."

Wilson never had another drink.

Carry This Message

Brimming with vision and new consciousness, Wilson blew back into the familiar world as if everything had changed -- not just for him, but for all of creation. He bragged that he was going to save every drunk in the world. He went scavenging for men to preach to, finding them in missions and hospitals and jails and among his own drinking buddies. Some of his targets thought he sounded an awful lot like the Bible-brandishing temperance ladies he had rebelled against as a young man. He discovered that many alcoholics were "not in favor of God" -- God was an authority figure and drunks don't deal well with authority.

"This doesn't work," he despaired to his wife, Lois. She reminded him that he was keeping at least one drunk sober -- himself.

But within months, even that project was at risk. Having been blinded like Saul on the road to Damascus, he now had his sight back and -- as often happens to the miraculously enlightened -- was discovering little by little that he was much the same as before.

Tempted while on a business trip in Akron, Ohio, Wilson fought off the bottle by cold-calling churches from the hotel directory in search of a drunk to help. One call led him to an alcoholic surgeon named Bob Smith. Initially, Smith objected to being saved -- this was after one of those sad-but-hilarious tales that give a sort of rosy glow to a truly savage disease: Wilson's first scheduled encounter with Smith was called off after the doctor staggered home blotto carrying an enormous potted plant for no discernible reason. He deposited the non sequitur before his bewildered wife, then passed out.

The next day, when they finally met, Wilson answered Smith's reluctance by saying that he wasn't there for Smith, he was there for Bill Wilson. This was a key insight in the development of AA -- the realization that helping another drunk is key to staying sober oneself. It reflected Wilson's new humility about his wondrous white light and great clean wind. Before, he was trying to work miracles in the lives of others. Now, he was just trying to maintain the miracle in his own.

And it worked. After one relapse, Smith, who had been drinking even longer and harder than Wilson, got sober. Bill W. and Dr. Bob shared the story of their recoveries with more drunks in this same spirit. Some of those men and women got sober themselves, and reached out to still others. And so on, down through the years and out around the planet to the largely anonymous millions of today, who range from celebrities to legislators to schoolteachers to busboys, from a former first lady to the businessman striding down the sidewalk to the desperate soul working on a second sober sunrise. AA is now so widespread and well known that creators of the children's movie "Finding Nemo" could playfully include a 12-step meeting for fish-addicted sharks, confident that every parent in the global reach of Disney would get the joke.

It's impossible to know exactly how many people have tried AA, how many stayed sober, how many attend meetings and how often. The group is not only anonymous, it is non-hierarchical, nondenominational, non-centralized, nonpartisan. According to the Twelve Traditions that govern AA, there is no requirement for membership except a desire to stop drinking, and the group endorses no cause apart from that one. All it takes to convene an AA meeting is two alcoholics who feel like talking, and the tone of the meetings is as varied as the people who choose to attend. Group consensus rules in all things, so in any good-size city there are smoking meetings and nonsmoking meetings, meetings for early risers and for night owls, meetings mostly populated by long-timers and meetings more oriented to the newly sober.

The 12 Steps and decentralized structure have proved so effective and popular that other groups have copied the template for dealing with other problems: Narcotics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous and so forth. But AA has never branched out. Getting and staying sober has been labor enough.

Unlike many spiritual visionaries, Wilson came to understand "that when he heard the voice of God, it was often just the voice of Bill Wilson," as Cheever puts it. And so, in the now-famous catechism that he created, AA members are pledged simply to turn their will and lives over to "the care of God as we understood him," with italics right there in the Big Book. Prospective converts are often assured that they may take as their God the nearest radiator if that's what works for them. Almighty God with the white beard, or a gentle breeze in the treetops, or the sublime engineering of a molecule, or the vastness of space, or the love of friends, or the power of the AA meeting itself: Choose your own Infinite.

Whatever works.

In the can-do land of the bottom line, even our spirituality tends to be results-oriented.

But the language of AA plays provocatively with a simple word: "work." In one sense, sobriety is something that just happens, much like Wilson's great clean wind. It is a gift from the Higher Power to the alcoholic. At the same time, "work" means work, as in tangible, sometimes even grudging, effort. In the early days, Bill W. and Dr. Bob would sit in the Smith parlor refining their drunk-saving techniques, and often Smith's wife, Anne, read aloud from the Bible. They were partial to the Epistle of James, which reminded them that "faith without works is dead." AA members speak of "working the steps," and many meetings end with the affirmation that "it works if you work it."

This means returning again and again to the state of mind and the exercises that constitute the upkeep on each miracle of sobriety. Beginning with the admission that they are powerless over alcohol and continuing through labors of humility, repentance, meditation and service, AA members maintain the dam that holds back the obliterating tide of booze from their lives.

A Friend of Bill W.

Cheever is a forthright woman with a big laugh and no immediately obvious illusions, a hard-working writer who publishes books like clockwork, pens a column for Newsday and teaches at Bennington College. She decided to write about Wilson because "I loved him. I loved how he changed the world without knowing it, just as a way to stop drinking himself. I loved his Yankeeness," by which she seems to mean a range of qualities, from the Emersonian flinty optimism, to the unsentimental practicality, to the hovering dark clouds and the weirdo seances, which she calls his "table-tapping after dark."

No doubt she also loved Wilson for the fact that his miracle, worked and reworked through the long chain of drunks, touched her own family, late in the life of her father, the short-story artist John Cheever. Booze was the lubricant of Cheever's masterpieces. He was the poet laureate of postwar suburbia, in which hope, striving, lust and angst were all refracted through the bottom of a cocktail glass.

But what was symbol and atmosphere in his stories was toxic in John Cheever's life, as his daughter explained in her acclaimed memoirs "Home Before Dark," and booze washed into Susan Cheever's life as well. In her book "Note Found in a Bottle," she recalls learning to mix a martini by the age of 6, and doing plenty of drinking as an adult. Susan Cheever now speaks of her father's AA years as an amazing gift to the whole family, not a gift of bliss so much as a gift of simple reality. When a drunk enters the unreal world of his illness, he takes his family and friends with him.

Her homage to the family benefactor is pro-Wilson but not hagiographic. "I like to take saints and make them into people," she explains. She touches the spiritual bases in her portrait of Wilson, but seems more moved by the concrete elements. Over lunch at a Manhattan bistro, she recalls her first visit to Wilson's boyhood home in East Dorset, Vt., not far from the Bennington campus. Cheever noticed the low ceiling of the stairway leading to Wilson's room, and caught a glimpse in her mind's eyes, so to speak, of the gangly boy having to duck his head each time he passed.

"And I was him," for that moment, she says. "I understood what it was to be a depressed 10-year-old boy trapped in that house" after his parents had abandoned him to his remote and austere grandparents.

It's not easy making a spiritual figure compelling and real without slipping into iconoclasm. Cheever's approach is to apply a writerly version of Wilson's humility. She gets the goods on his serial adultery, for instance, but declines to make too much of it. "He was engaged to Lois when he was 18 -- hello!" Cheever says. "They were married 53 years. All we really know is that they were friends through an amazing life. He was a good-enough husband."

Likewise, she can look into Wilson's LSD experiment with proto-hippie Aldous Huxley without getting mired in a puritanical inquisition into whether this constituted a "slip" in his sobriety or hypocrisy in his creed.

This attitude allows Cheever to see that Wilson's inconsistencies and quirks weren't blemishes on his record -- they were the essence of a flawed man who was endlessly seeking what works. "Again and again, his intuitions were wrong," Cheever says. "But he wasn't interested in problems. He was interested in solutions." Most of the key traditions of AA operations, including its independence, anonymity and governance-by-consensus, ran counter to Wilson's personal disposition. "He wanted fame and fortune, but somehow was able to figure out that AA would have to be a group in which nobody represents it, nobody speaks for it and nobody's in charge of it."

Sobering Reality

The striking thing about Wilson's story -- which only settles in upon reflection -- is how hard his life was even after he sobered up.

What, really, had that bright light and clean wind changed? He and Lois remained penniless, even homeless, for years. Sometimes it seemed that AA was determined to keep him poor forever. He had a chance to cash in by allying his message with a particular hospital, but his fledgling flock forbade him to do it. He harbored hope that John D. Rockefeller Jr. would lavish money on him, but instead Rockefeller came through with a tiny stipend. Alcoholics Anonymous struggled for six long and underwhelming years before catching its crucial break: a glowing article in the Saturday Evening Post.

Then, as the group flourished, Wilson was attacked by jealous colleagues and abandoned by old friends. He sank into a crushing depression, and "often just sat for hours with his head on the desk or with his head in his hands," Cheever writes. "When he raised his head, he was sometimes weeping." Wilson liked children but was childless. Cigarettes were killing him but he couldn't stop smoking.

He wrote of "being swamped with guilt and self-loathing . . . often getting a misshapen and painful pleasure out of it."

It was enough to drive a man to drink.

Yet for 36-plus years of this troubled and very human life, he was able to resist that next drink. Perhaps the most efficacious miracles are the small ones. And because "his mind was the right lens" and his will was "the right machine," in Cheever's words, for mass-producing that limited but crucial victory, Bill Wilson's miracle keeps working, one person and one day at a time.

To be fair AA doesn't tell anybody anything. There are only suggestions.. :) It was in that spirit that I let my primary requirement for membership lapse. I realised that there were too many ways I was hurting myself to focus on just one element. If I could not learn to look after more of these I would die irrespective of my sobriety.

I'm still gathering steam but I hope to have even more reason to celebrate in my second year of meds. I was lucky to have taken seriously the principles of the 12 steps. The fundamentals are sound ancient standards for good living.

Humility, and a less intense ego all helped set the stage for a more open mind.

I still remain aware that addictions are a subtle foe. AA saved my life, my family and what was left of my dignity. I believe it served me well and taught me a lot about growing up. I believe that my emotional development stopped when I began abusing and didn't move forward again until I cleaned up.

I'm quite a firm believer that I should do what I can before, during and after medication. I'm enjoying a lift from depressive times through exercise and diet just now. The past year has been good that way and the Dexedrine has helped me to reflect on my progress better and thus avoid some of the mistakes of my past attempts. Injury has always plagued me through any effort to train for sports but thankfully not this time so far.

I'm very interested in becoming a better person and AA's principles helped with that. I've been careful to resist throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Much remains to be done.
Cheers! Ian.

The biggest problem with the AA program is that mental disorders are not dealt with at all. It works within the paradigm that the individual is the problem and spirituality is the solution, which maybe true for people who have normal brain capacity.

abre los ojos,

I've certainly seen that in AA as well, though many people in AA acknowlege depression as a mental disorder that ought to be treated by outside help.

Even outside help may not be so good.

I've been going to a depression workshop at my health plan. Last week I discussed my problems with inattention, boredom, over-stimulation and social burnout during the holidays without mention of ADD (I played the devil's advocate). The therapist kept seeking psychological explanations why I behave in that way. She didn't feel that I was hardwired towards disfunction in any way.

I gave examples of how I deal with social burnout now-- leaving a social situation or taking a break from it -- versus how I've dealt with burnout in the past -- starting arguments, insulting people, wreaking havoc or getting plastered to amp up the stimulation. She still insisted that I shouldn't have to leave the situation, that I had some fundamental core belief that had to change.

In AA, regardless of problems I've had, I've been told that it's quite OK to leave a situation that I'm uncomfortable with. AA folk may couch it in terms of protecting sobriety -- when it's a mental health issue -- but it's still an insightful suggestion that has helped me cope with ADD many years before I knew anything about ADD.

AA's just not specific enough for problems of hardwired mental illness. That's what led me to outside help-- Oh, yeah, that and crushing depression and an inabilty to move forward with my life -- much like you describe.


The article on Bill W. was great. I'll have to check out Cheever's book. I found his LSD use to be interesting, to say the least.


Ian- I've Felt the same way about AA focusing on one problem when I have other problems just as deadly. I'm trying to take what I need from it.

Stimulents seem to be helping me in many ways that I did not think possible. I would hate to give up this experiment for a concept of sobriety.

I'm making a personal decision that stimulant medication does coincide with sobriety. But, I'm trying to be cautious.

Thanks for the insights from both of you. It good to get the support.

Cheers,

The more reflections I have access to the better I like it. Thanks to both of you.
I like the tone here.

http://www.addforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13387

Until I read this post I did not know how recent a struggle diagnosis is for mental health issues. I printed this out last night and really enjoyed the bit of history. I had no idea how young the game is.

Cheers! Ian

I don't think I'm being unfair to AA, just adding perspective. AA has obtained institutional status, and most groups have become extremely dogmatic. Anyone who traverses outside the group orthodoxy is thoroughly judged and looked as an outcast. Ask your group why they are judging you if the program is just a "suggestion." AA has obtained cult status. It calls alcoholism a disease, and instead of medication it uses God as the sole treatment. Excuse me, are we still living in 14th Century?? It's unbelievable that AA has been able grow to its current size with practically no outside examination or scrutany. Where is the intellectual accountablity by the psychiatric community.

I've been sober for 17 years and still attend AA, but I have always placed my personal spirituality ahead of AA group dogma. My spirituality is bigger than AA, and always will be. I take from AA what I need, and leave the rest. I interpret the program in the light of my own spiritual experiences, as Bill Wilson himself suggested. If I would have allowed AA to sell me their dogma I'd still be drunk with the other 90% it doesnt work for.

I feel sorry for people who come into AA and subjected to the so called suggestions, which are really rules, because if you don't do what they say you are going to get DRUNK.

The steps are great for me, and I work them in light of my own spiritual understanding. I do inventories, I make ammends, and meditate on a daily basis. My experiences have led me to an understanding of spirituality w/out the primitive type God of the heavens. I am the problem, and the solution is inside me not in some God of the heavens. I happen to call God a state of mind called spirituality, and this state of mind has awakened in me, AS ME. I'm with Jesus when he said, "The Father and I are one." I don't pray for God to give me anything, but instead I'm thankful that I have all the answers inside myself. This is my experience, and this has kept me sober. I have no desire for a drink, only to live up to my potential, mind, body and spirit.

I still take my medications. I take an SSRI for my OCD and a stimulant for ADD. But, I still take practice my spiritualty on a daily basis. There is nothing incompatible about spirituality and medication. If I had diabetes I'd feel the same thing about insulin.

What's also interesting about AA groups frowning on taking medications, other than the fact that Bill W. advocated LSD use as a treatment, is that when Bill was actually treated with Belladonna in Towns Hospital where he had his "spiritual release from alcohol." Belladonna is a Hallucinogentic which has been used for 1000's of years to bring about mind expanding spiritual revelations. No wonder he said his LSD experience "was not unlike his experience in (towns) hospital." So, tell me again why it's unacceptable to use a low dose pycho-stimulant for a legitament brain disorder that causes tragic dysfunction in a person's life and family. It's also worth noting that almost everyone in AA is addicted to caffeine and nicotine, both of which are mood altering chemicals. In fact, neither Dr. Bob nor Bill W. were able to give up coffee or smoking. Bill ended up dying from emphysema.

I feel sorry for people who come into AA and subjected to the so called suggestions, which are really rules, because if you don't do what they say you are going to get DRUNK.

I've seen many drunks and addicts who need to accept the AA steps and suggestions fully as concrete Rules. This rigidity works for them and has saved many lives from drink and drug.

Such rigidity does not work for me, nor does it work for everyone in AA. It takes all kinds to make an AA fellowship conducive to recovery.

There seems to be lots of wiggle room in AA, and I'm thankful for that.

The Big Book thumpers helped keep me sober in early recovery because they ****ed me off. I'll show them! I'll get through this or that crisis without drinking, regardless my shabby program and my sacriligious sponsor!

Abre los ojos, I appreciate your sentiments, and it seems that you're using AA to your benefit. Plus, dissent is good for AA. There are a lot of us out there who don't tow the line. We remain sober and we help make AA a living, dynamic community.

AA (and NA) have saved my life, have provided me with friends and lovers. I want to continue as a member.


Peace,

balance is everything.

hey stanzen,
i didn't read through all the replies, but i just wanted to say that i take med's (albeit they aren't narcotics), and while active in NA/ AA I just don't tell anyone about it. I just don't. You'll find out there are people you can tell, whom you trust and who won't tell anyone else, but you'll also find those that you shouldn't let know. some people are REALLY adamant about "no mind-altering chemicals." some will even go so far as to bash psychiatry altogether. you can really lose friends over this-- that's why i suggest only telling people who are going to be cool about it.

my sponsor lost a lot of her friends because she took one 5 mg hydrocodone pill twice a day for five years for a severe back injury. i never saw her once act loaded, so i believe her when she says she never took anything her doc didn't recommend. she was always bright-eyed and alert. still, people tried to ostracize her over it. sucks.

best wishes!

The reason AA doesn't address any thing related to mental illness and focus soley on soberity because that's what they are all about. If the groups focus went like my unmedicated state they would be as unproductive as I can be.

I take Adderall and have for 7 years, I still claim my soberity because I am not abusing drugs, nor do I take them to get high, they help me deal with my problems, but I DO NOT use them to solve my problems. That is what makes me sober to me. Each person's program is just that THIER PROGRMAM...Ever heard the term "taking some one else's inventory"? I am open as a person and that workd for me but it doesn't work for everyone. People have tried to tell me I could count as sober because I take meds..my opnion is it is MY soberity I can count it if I want.

I still claim my soberity because I am not abusing drugs, nor do I take them to get high, they help me deal with my problems, but I DO NOT use them to solve my problems.

Tammy- You hit the nail on the head, here; using meds to deal with problems vs. using them to solve problems. I think I will keep the meds issue to myself. There are a few people I can trust with the info, but not many. I talk to one friend of mine who is sympathetic. That might be enough for now.

Clueless -
One AA friend of mine has been in a lot of pain for years. When he's not in the hospital for some medical proceedure (or surgery), he takes prescription narcotics which reduce his pain, but he never mentions this at the group level, nor to most people in the program. He doesn't seek out narcotics and he is quite sober (like 30 years off booze). Sober like your sponsor.


In my case, I do feel sober and I have little desire to abuse drugs or booze again. I like the program and want to remain involved.

An aside- I spent the last few days at lake Tahoe with my older brother and sister. This is the first time in maybe 20 years that we were alone together. Man, is my brother hyperactive ADD! The Ritalin helped me maintain my balance with all the old family relationships morphing and remerging. And I wasn't nodding out, or passed out, or babbling insanely, or starting fights! And we're all closer, now.
Cool. AA, NA and psycho drugs, Oh, My,.

Thanks for the support.

Way to go glad to hear it , revitilizing and growing in personal relationships that are healthy is what my life is all about.

Warning Tammy orginal ------> There are only two things in life that can not be replaced, time and the people with whom we share it.

AA actually came out with something a few years back stating that they do not disaprove of people using medication to treat mental illnesses. Wendy Richardson discussed it during one her sessions at the ADDA Conference last May.

Her book "The Link Between ADD and ADDiction (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1576830047/ref%3Dnosim/addforums-20)" discusses AA and why the program itself may be very hard for people with ADD to follow. She also has a new book coming out in a few weeks "When Too Much Isnt Enough: Ending The Destructive Cycle Of Adhd And Addictive Behavior (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1576836312/ref%3Dnosim/addforums-20/)"