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I've never really had faith in myself that I could stay sober. A lot of people in my life had given up hope on me and didn't think I was going to make it. You don't know what your life's going to be like in a year. If you choose recovery, if you take the suggestions, you could be living this big, beautiful life.
It's been so life changing and it's the best decision I ever made.
You're hearing there from people featured in a short film called No More Secret. It's a short film that's going to debut to that focuses on addiction and recovery. We're going to talk about that here with Jenna Wouh. She's a senior clinician at Mountainside A Treatment Center. Doctor Manasahni is with us as well, director of Addiction Psychology at Northwell.
He's a psychiatrist. And Jenna, let me start with you and kind of the driving thrust of this short film which centers on two individuals, one named Peter, one named Rachel, and they're talking, yes, about addiction, but about the process by which they sought help and went into recovery. And I wonder if you could talk a bit about that, the forcing mechanism, that the way by which people decide it's something that they need to do, that they have to seek out recovery.
Oh, thank you, David Well. I think for most people it's not a choice. Usually, life gets to a point where it is so uncomfortable and unbearable for not just them but their family, community, productivity at work, that they have got to make a change and the only way
is in the other direction. And we really wanted to explore two different family relationships and two different d visuals that made that change, that decided that they had to do something differently, and that meant asking for help, being more public about their struggle. You know, we all struggle with something, but addiction is something that is still riddled with shame and tremendous amount of stigma, both from the
community and often internally in the family system. So we wanted to take this opportunity to really share with people openly what we saw as a call for action to end the stigma around addiction. So making this film and collaborating with Shatterproof was a natural segue there called action, you know, in that they focused completely on breaking the stigma of addiction nationwide, so that sort of had this game to be I.
Want to stick with you, Janna. I did get a chance to look at the short film to take a look, and I thought that it was very, very emotional. I felt like it was tear jerking and all the sort But what I did notice from it was the importance of community. Can you just speak a bit more about the purpose and the importance of community for those that are recovering from addiction.
Yes, I'm glad you saw that. I think it's absolutely essential. Actually, evidence based practice finds that group therapy is far more effective than individual therapy for substance us to serves. We know other things are also very important, like medicaid assistant treatment. But going back to the question of community, it's actually related having a community that understands and supports you and
again doesn't judge you. You know, with addiction, unfortunately, the behaviors that come with it are typically pretty reprehensible and really affect relationships, and it's very difficult when you love someone to separate that person from those behaviors. So having a community that's not going to judge you, where you can share some things that you've done that you might not understand with maybe an appropriate clinical guide in this process or a pure support recovery coach, and a community
heals people in ways I can't see anything else. You know, that community and ability to say what I've done where I'm struggling and have other people here respect you, understand and help you process. That is invaluable, doctor Harney.
Watching this film, you hear from these two individuals. You hear from members of their family as well. So in the case of Peter, you hear from his wife who wrote him a letter at some point. You hear from Rachel's father who was worried about her, And there's kind of a through line between both of them that they were each wrestling with the fact that they thought that this story might end with the death of their spouse
or their child. What is your counsel to family members who are seeing somebody in their families a spouse, a child going through this and want something catalytic to happen by which they could seek health.
Well, it is really a challenge and disease in that sense that it not only affects people's lives, but also affects their significant others as well, affects their kids, affects their significant others, family members, and others. Now, the issue with the addiction as it is is it does affects people behavior. It makes a bit of a change in their personality and their behavior that upsets the support system.
And speaking of the support system that Norah was asking about, whenever we do an evaluation and a new patient, one of the most important predictive factor of their recovery is how big is your support system who is existing around in your sphere to provide support for you. Now, we come to the support system and we provide the advice is stay supportive, stay there, stay there for them. They're struggling. They're not doing that by choice. As we say, addiction is not a choice.
How challenging is that? Not to interrupt, but I mean, how challenging is it to convey that message to the family.
It is not easy. It is not easy, and it's not a straightforward things. Some days you're willing and happy to support your spouse or kid, other days you're really tired, And we continue to provide that. Now there are groups that we have specially for significant others. Also, if you hear about the l on on that that's for the family and the kids of those who suffer from addictive disorders.
Well, addiction is very clearly a disease, as we've been pointing out on this conversation. Can you speak to the resources available from a medical standpoint in terms of treating this as a medical concern.
Well, we know about it way more than we did in the past. This is one we know that the chemicals that are implicated, and the mechanism of happening, how it affects, Where does that affect the brain, what the retrans method that implicates, So we know how it works. It's a chronic brain disease. You can compare it to diabetes, it can compare it to hypertension and so forth. Now it does also have medication that affects it and helps
you with it. We have so many medications if you're going to talk about, let's say opoid use or we do have evidence that we have methadone that helps with it a lot. We have upernorphine, which has been helping for ages since the year two thousand and three. We have noxon on narcan that can revive and get people from overdose. So we have the medical model. We know how it works, we know the process, and we know that it has some kind of management that can help people do your own recovery as well.
Just in the minute that we have left. This is a business finance economic show. A lot of folks who listen are on Wall Street working on Wall Street, and I gat this is a community that has been historically at least resistant to talking with or confronting at these issues.
Absolutely, I think there's a high cost to acknowledging that you need help. But we do see a lot of people that are in very high stress jobs and this becomes an outlet and it's very difficult then to ask for help. We also know, too, if they have a partner that's struggling, their own productivity is affected and that can be very difficult too. These aren't the types of things you might tell your colleague at work, or other parents at the parent pick up. Oh, my wife's drinking
too much. These are things that are very painful to hold and can be very consuming. So I think lastly, one important thing I wanted to put out there is we know that recovery is out there, There is hope, there's a lot of joy in life, but not just
for the individual, but for the entire family system. We have a whole program at Mountainside, particularly just for family members that they don't have a substance use disorder diagnoses, but they love someone that does, and it's been essential to work with them from that lens of people that specialize in this, that see them and see the disease and want to be with them.
Well, thank you both for being here, really appreciate it. That's Jenna Wous, senior clinician at Mountainside, doctor Manassahni joining us as well, Director of Addiction Psychology at Northwell, a practicing psychiatrist, and just noting again that the short film is called No More Secrets Than It's going to make its debut at Mountain Sides New York City Center at six o'clock. It's about ten twelve minutes long. And would catalyze a conversation like the one that we've had here,
just surrounding the issue of ad and recovery. This is the Bloomberg Business Weekdaily podcast, available on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live weekday afternoons from two to five pm Eastern on Bloomberg dot com, the iHeartRadio app, tune In, and the Bloomberg Business App. You can also watch us live every weekday on YouTube and always on the Bloomberg terminal