ASAM Now Defines Addiction As Brain Disorder























Addiction receives a new definition:

MSNBC
Addiction is a chronic brain disorder and not simply a behavior problem involving alcohol, drugs, gambling or sex, experts contend in a new definition of addiction, one that is not solely related to problematic substance abuse.

The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) just released this new definition of addiction after a four-year process involving more than 80 experts.

"At its core, addiction isn't just a social problem or a moral problem or a criminal problem. It's a brain problem whose behaviors manifest in all these other areas," said Dr. Michael Miller, past president of ASAM who oversaw the development of the new definition. "Many behaviors driven by addiction are real problems and sometimes criminal acts. But the disease is about brains, not drugs. It's about underlying neurology, not outward actions."

The new definition also describes addiction as a primary disease, meaning that it's not the result of other causes, such as emotional or psychiatric problems...

Read Addiction / Brain Disorder in full.

picsource:http://www.flickr.com/photos/alancleaver/4104954991/

Inspirational Recovery Quotes: Change


If you keep on doing what you've always done, you'll keep on getting what you've always got.
W. L. Bateman

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Reinhold Niebuhr

They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
Andy Warhol

No one is in control of your happiness but you; therefore, you have the power to change anything about yourself or your life that you want to change.
Barbara de Angelis

 The key to change... is to let go of fear.
Rosanne Cash

 You can't punish yourself into change. You can't whip yourself into shape. But you can love yourself into well-being.
Susan Skye

The most important thing to remember is this: To be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become.
William Edward Burghardt DuBois

He that never changes his opinions, never corrects his mistakes, and will never be wiser on the morrow than he is today.
Tryon Edwards

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
Alice Walker

Without realizing it, you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day; of course, you achieve quite a lot in the course of time. Anyone can do this, it costs nothing and is certainly very helpful. Whoever doesn't know it must learn and find by experience that a quiet conscience makes one strong.
Anne Frank

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.
Abraham Lincoln

It doesn't matter how long we may have been stuck in a sense of our limitations. If we go into a darkened room and turn on the light, it doesn't matter if the room has been dark for a day, a week, or ten thousand years -- we turn on the light and it is illuminated. Once we control our capacity for love and happiness, the light has been turned on.
Sharon Salzberg 

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
Gandhi

Continuity gives us roots; change gives us branches, letting us stretch and grow and reach new heights.
Pauline R. Kezer

Our only security is our ability to change.
John Lilly

Sometimes it's the smallest decisions that can change your life forever.
Keri Russell

The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.
Flora Whittemore

The price of doing the same old thing is far higher than the price of change.
Bill Clinton

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Unknown

We all have big changes in our lives that are more or less a second chance.
Harrison Ford

The mind has exactly the same power as the hands; not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.
Colin Wilson

To change one's life, start immediately, do it flamboyantly, no exceptions.
William James

Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.
Maria Robinson

Things do not change; we change.
Henry David Thoreau

There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction.
Winston Churchill

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.
Anatole France

The bamboo that bends is stronger than the oak that resists.
Japanese Proverb

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.
Confucius

Life is a process. We are a process. The universe is a process.
Anne Wilson Schaef

What man actually needs is not a tension-less state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.
Viktor Frankl

Change is the essence of life.Be willing to surrender what you are for what you could become.
Reinhold Niebuhr

I can be changed by what happens to me, but i refuse to be reduced by it.
Maya Angelou

Sometimes its the smallest decisions that can change your life forever.
Keri Russell

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.
M. Scott Peck

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Frederick Douglass

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
Richard Bach

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

Every beginning is a consequence - every beginning ends some thing.
Paul Valery

Relentless, repetitive self talk is what changes our self-image.
Denis Waitley

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
Henri Bergson

The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.
Gloria Steinem

So long as a person is capable of self-renewal they are a living being.
Henri-Frederic Amiel

There is a danger of changing too much in the search for perfection.
Agnetha Faltskog

What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.
Mignon McLaughlin

You may wonder, 'How can I leave it all behind if I am just coming back to it? How can I make a new beginning if I simply return to the old?' The answer lies in the return. You will not come back to the 'same old thing.' What you return to has changed because you have changed. Your perceptions will be altered. You will not incorporate into the same body, status, or world you left behind. The river has been flowing while you were gone. Now it does not look like the same river.
Steven Foster

Learn wisdom from the ways of a seedling. A seedling which is never hardened off through stressful situations will never become a strong productive plant.
Stephen Sigmund

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
Alan Watts

It's not so much that we're afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it's that place in between that we fear . . . . It's like being between trapezes. It's Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There's nothing to hold on to.
Marilyn Ferguson

If you would attain to what you are not yet, you must always be displeased by what you are. For where you are pleased with yourself there you have remained. Keep adding, keep walking, keep advancing.
Saint Augustine

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
Aldous Huxley

Change always comes bearing gifts.
Price Pritchett

If you don't create change, change will create you.
Unknown

A lot of people get impatient with the pace of change.
James Levine

Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
Mark Twain

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
Lao Tzu

Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.
Arnold Bennett

Change brings opportunity.
Nido Qubein

If you accept the expectations of others, especially negative ones, then you never will change the outcome.
Michael Jordan

To change your life, you need to change your priorities.
John C. Maxwell

Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have.
Margaret Mead

If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living.
Gail Sheehy

Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.
Harriet Tubman

Action and reaction, ebb and flow, trial and error, change - this is the rhythm of living. Out of our over-confidence, fear; out of our fear, clearer vision, fresh hope. And out of hope, progress.
Bruce Barton

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
C. S. Lewis

If you want things to be different, perhaps the answer is to become different yourself.
Norman Vincent Peale

The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning.
Ivy Baker Priest

Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.
Marge Piercy

Lord, where we are wrong, make us willing to change; where we are right, make us easy to live with.
Peter Marshall

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.
Lao Tzu

We cannot change our past. We can not change the fact that people act in a certain way. We can not change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.
Charles R. Swindoll

Always remember that the future comes one day at a time.
Dean Acheson

Nothing that is can pause or stay;
The moon will wax, the moon will wane,
The mist and cloud will turn to rain,
The rain to mist and cloud again,
Tomorrow be today.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.
G.C. Lichtenberg

If we fall, we don't need self-recrimination or blame or anger - we need a reawakening of our intention and a willingness to re-commit, to be whole-hearted once again.
Sharon Salzberg

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.
Eleanor Roosevelt

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.
Ellen Glasgow

Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely.
Unknown

Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.
Hafiz of Persia

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.
Francis Bacon

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
Shakespeare

Life is a progress, and not a station.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.
Marge Piercy

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.
Arthur Schopenhauer

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
Carl Rogers

There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anais Nin


*See sidebar menu for more Inspirational Recovery Quotes and Recovery Quotes of the Week.


picsource:http://www.flickr.com/photos/tzung-tze/3570699876/