Flourishing After Addiction with Carl Erik Fisher Carl Erik Fisher

This is a milestone for the Flourishing After Addiction podcast: our first repeat guest! I wanted to have Ryan Hampton back on the pod for a quick hit: to discuss the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on the controversial bankruptcy settlement involving Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family. As you may know, the Court rejected the settlement involving Purdue, which shielded members of the Sackler family from lawsuits. I thought there was no one better than Ryan to help us understand this ruli...

Carrie Wilkens is a psychologist with over 25 years of experience in the practice and dissemination of evidence-based treatments for substance use and post-traumatic stress. She and her team at the Center for Motivation and Change have developed the Invitation to Change approach for families and loved ones of people struggling with substance use, as well as the professionals who support them. This is a change model that has been used in group, family, and individual work, including by counsel...

One of the great gifts of being out in the world talking about addiction and recovery is I get to meet so many fascinating and talented people working on these issues. This is one of my deepest motivations for writing and speaking about my own experience; to connect with other values-aligned writers and thinkers. One wonderful recent example is the fantastic writer Laura Cathcart Robbins, our guest on this latest episode of the Flourishing After Addiction podcast. Laura is the author of ...

In this episode of Flourishing After Addiction, I had the honor of speaking with Bruce Alexander, a towering figure in the field of addiction theory. As regular Rat Park readers will know, I named this newsletter after Bruce’s iconic experiment in the 1970s, honoring not just that experiment, but also the decades of contributions he’s made since to the broader understanding of addiction as a deeply human phenomenon. Now that Bruce is in his 80s, he’s said he won’t be doing much more writing a...

As a bonus for this special episode with the artist Erin Williams, author of What’s Wrong? Personal Histories of Chronic Pain and Bad Medicine, I got permission to post some of the illustrations from her new book, What’s Wrong? Personal Histories of Chronic Pain and Bad Medicine. Head over to my Substack page to see those. You won’t want to miss them.Erin Williams is the author and illustrator of ten books, including What's Wrong? Personal Histories of Chronic Pain and Bad Medicine, Commute: ...

Dr. Ray Baker is a distinguished leader in the field of addiction medicine and a person in long-term recovery from addiction. This episode of Flourishing After Addiction particularly resonates with the theme of the longer-form writings I’m starting to post about frameworks for making sense of recovery, so I’m grateful to have the chance to talk with him.A highlight of the conversation is Ray’s insight into the various processes of recovery, as he advocates for a holistic approach across diffe...