Alcoholics Anonymous and Psychiatric Medication?!
Question:
Alcoholics Anonymous and Psychiatric Medication?
Does AA ask or expect you to stop taking psychiatric medication? Do other addiction treatment programs either inpatient or outpatient expect you to stop meds? Hoping for personal experience responses.
Answers:
I was told repeatedly by AA members that if I took medication, I wasn't really sober, that it would lead to relapse, and that I would "die drunk in a gutter". (Those exact words by different people, some in different states, so it wasn't just one persons opinion.) In one pro-AA recovery Yahoo group, I asked about the use of medication and received a half-dozen cruel, off-board remarks. I've even heard of people being told to go off of heart medication by fanatics!
I now work in the mental health field. When I started, I worked with people that all had substance abuse and mental health issues. Every one of them had encountered the anti-medication faction at some point; some did with disasterous results.
AA has a large anti-medication, anti-therapy faction that is responsible for the deaths of many who took their advice, went off of medication and died as a result of suicide. Almost everyone that's been around the rooms for any length of time knows of at least one person this has happened to.
George Valliant, Harvard professor, researcher, and member of AA's Board of Trustees, attempted to prove that AA works. He found that a person using AA methods was SIX TIMES as likely to end up dead than a person attempting to quit on their own. He remarked on his findings: "Not only had we failed to alter the natural history of alcoholism, but our death rate of three percent a year was appalling."
http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-effe...