Flourishing After Addiction with Carl Erik Fisher
Addiction psychiatrist and bioethicist Carl Erik Fisher explores addiction and recovery from science to spirituality, from philosophy to politics, and everything in between. He interviews leading experts in areas such as psychology, neurobiology, history, sociology, and more--as well as policy makers, advocates, and people with lived experience.
A core commitment of the show is we need more than medicine to truly understand addiction and recovery. The challenges and mysteries of this field run up against some of the central challenges of human life, like: what makes a life worth living, what are the limits of self control, and how can people and societies change for the better? These are enormous questions, and they need to be approached with humility, but there are also promising ways forward offered by refreshingly unexpected sources.
There are many paths to recovery, and there is tremendous hope for changing the narrative, injecting more nuance into these discussions, and making flourishing in recovery possible for all.
Please check out https://www.carlerikfisher.com to join the newsletter and stay in touch.
Flourishing After Addiction with Carl Erik Fisher
“Health in All” to prevent and treat addiction, with public health leader Dr. Wilnise Jasmin.
Flourishing after addiction requires flourishing for all. The public health of addiction and recovery has several important lessons, not just how to respond to the overdose crisis, but also, and more concretely, how to think holistically about addiction and all the factors that support someone’s recovery. How to protect the mental health of ourselves, our families, and our broader communities, now and for generations to come.
Dr. Wilnise Jasmin is a family medicine doctor and leader in the city of Chicago’s public health system, where in addition to battling COVID-19, she directs the city’s Behavioral Health program. A crucial focus of her work is the opioid overdose epidemic, which disproportionately affects Black residents and is one of the drivers of an 8.8-year life expectancy gap between Black and White Chicagoans. But despite a brutal 2020 and 2021, as overdose rates soared across the country, the Chicago Department of Public Health actually reported a decrease in opioid-related deaths in the first half of 2021. In this episode, we talk more about how they managed this feat, and what those practices and approaches have to teach us about addiction and recovery.
Wilnise Jasmin, M.D., M.P.H., M.B.A., is the Medical Director of Behavioral Health at the Chicago Department of Public Health. She is part of the leadership team responsible for the city’s initiatives in the areas of violence prevention, substance use and prevention, and mental health. She specializes in both Preventive Medicine (Public Health)—which she studied at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health—and Family Medicine, having trained at the Cook County-Loyola Family Medicine Residency Program, where she served as a Chief Resident. She is also a fellow in the University of California-Irvine Primary Care in Psychiatry program, and she serves as the Chair for the American College of Preventive Medicine's Annual Conference's Population Health and Health Systems track. You can learn more about how Chicago is fighting opioid overdose deaths at http://www.overcomeopioids.org, and connect with Dr. Jasmin on Twitter @wilnisej.
In this episode:
- Naloxone (Narcan) in vending machines (and for a brief account and photo of a similar vending machine program in Las Vegas, look here).
- How Chicago worked on outreach with community groups to ameliorate a rise in suicides and overdoses--including how to forge authentic connections and dismantle stigma.
- Dr. Jasmin’s most important message for addressing stigma: not to say someone is broken or hammer on “disease” language, but to break down false divisions. "Substance use is not a 'them' problem. The face of substance use? You simply have to look in the mirror to see what someone with a substance use issue could look like. It could be anyone."
- One important way to prevent addiction: “Health in All” policies, a broader way of looking at all the many factors that influence health beyond traditional healthcare.
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