Recovering alcoholics say there is magic to be found in the rooms of their support groups. I have experienced and benefited from that, but, like others can’t name the exact ingredient of the meetings that has healing faculties.

Tara Handron, a playwright and actress, does as good of a job as anyone I’ve known, at uncovering why and how recovering alcoholics are able to stay sober when they spill their guts between four walls.

The other night I attended her one-person performance, a 60-minute play, that discards clichéd portrayals of recovery and relies on complex characters and richly layered stories to expose the raw emotions so many alcoholic women experience. Tara’s back-to-back portrayals of over 20 female alcoholics of various ages, ethnicities, and socio-economic backgrounds come out of her own thesis research on the subject, in face-to-face and computer mediated recovery meetings, as part of her Master’s degree program at Georgetown University. She challenges the role of technology, specifically online recovery meetings, is playing in the rehabilitation of alcoholics in the new millennium.

Johns Hopkins just published an interesting summary of the research recently on treating mood disorders with hallucinogens. In the most recent Depression and Anxiety Health Alert, the author chronicles the history of hallucinogens and how they affect the central nervous system to release the right kind of neurotransmitters. As per the Johns Hopkins report:

Hallucinogens (also called psychedelics) were a promising area of research in the 1960s and early 1970s, when they were being developed as possible treatments for a number of conditions, including depression, anxiety, and chronic pain. These drugs were banned in the ’70s and ’80s, however, after their recreational use became a widespread problem.

In 1990, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) again began allowing researchers to study the effects of drugs like MDMA (also known as the street drug “Ecstasy”), psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”), and ketamine (“Special K”). These drugs are thought to change the way the brain normally processes information and may provide people with mood disorders a new way of looking at the world and their problems

Since it is going back-to-school season, I thought I’d educate you on some alarming statistics about depression among college students. Here are the facts, just the facts:

One out of every five young people and one out of ever four college students or adults suffers from some form of diagnosable mental illness.

About 19 precent of young people contemplate or attempt suicide each year.

Suicide is the third leading cause of death among people ages 15-24, and the second leading cause of death in college students ages 20-24.

Over 66 percent of young people with a substance use disorder have a co-occurring mental health problem.

As Mel Gibson’s voicemails to his ex-girlfriend continue to be leaked to the Internet this week, many media outlets are asking questions about Mel Gibson’s mental health. That’s no wonder — the voicemails are laced with profanity, racial epithets, and threats. In a 2008 documentary, Acting Class of 1977, he first talked about being diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

But are the rants to his ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva related to a possible mental health diagnosis? Alcohol? Or something else?

It’s not easy to answer this question, because nobody except Mel Gibson, 54, and his doctors know. All we can do is speculate, based upon observations of his reactions, tone and behavior as recorded in the voicemails that are publicly available. So let’s take a look at some of Mel Gibson’s words and behaviors on these recordings.

By far my most popular post is the gallery, “12 Depression Busters.” But those suggestions were actually a response to Beyond Blue reader Peg’s query on how to stop smoking. They absolutely do help a person fight depression and the ongoing war against negative thoughts; however they were designed as techniques to use when getting pulled into addictive behaviors.

The last month or so I have used every single one of these. And I’m happy to report that I actually feel a lot freer from insidious, destructive behavior than I did several weeks ago. Here they are: 12 Addiction Zappers. They work!

1. Get Some Buddies

It works for Girl Scouts, depressives, and addicts of all kinds. I remember having to wake up my buddy to go pee in the middle of the night at Girl Scout camp. That was right before she rolled off her cot, out of the tent and down the hill, almost into the creek.

Our job as buddies is to help each other not roll out of the tent and into the stream, and to keep each other safe during midnight bathroom runs. My buddies are the six numbers programmed into my cell phone, the voices that remind me sometimes as many as five times a day: “It will get better.”

On April 25th, Hallmark Hall of Fame will broadcast the movie “When Love Is Not Enough — The Lois Wilson Story,” starring Winona Ryder and Barry Pepper (CBS, 9:00 pm ET). The movie, which portrays the life of Lois Wilson, co-founder of Al-Anon Family Groups and wife of Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson, is based on William G. Borchert’s 2005 book, The Lois Wilson Story: When Love Is Not Enough.

Borchert’s earlier screenplay was the basis of the acclaimed movie My Name is Bill W. which starred James Woods, James Garner, and JoBeth Williams. The premiere of the movie also falls during the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, Inc.’s (NCADD) 24th Annual Alcohol Awareness Month with its theme, “When Love Is Not Enough: Helping Families Coping With Alcoholism.”

Lois Wilson fell in love with a man whose alcoholism brought his life and their relationship to the brink before he began his personal recovery and helped found Alcoholics Anonymous. Lois and many of the other wives of early AA members also began to band together for mutual support, formalizing these meetings into Al-Anon Family Groups in 1951.

When Love is Not Enough is the story of Lois Wilson and her life with Bill Wilson.

Imagine a GPS navigational system that said something like this: “In approximately 30 minutes, you will run into your old boss, who will want to make you feel like a worthless pile of feces. Erect personal boundaries immediately…. I said, Get in your bubble, Woman … Are you listening? She’s approaching you on your left. Lock up all childhood tapes now (the ones that convinced you that were weak, ugly, and pathetic) and DO NOT, I said DO NOT play them for her. Remember, their messages are no longer valid. Proceed carefully. You will speak to her in approximately 3, no 2, no 1 second.”

Me? I would like one of those.

So I made one. In book form.

In my chapter about substance abuse in Beyond Blue, I wrote:

Today I realize the recovery cultures of addiction and mental illness clash. Like the Church of Scientology and neurobiology. Like Tom Cruise and common sense. Because complaining is considered whining to most twelve-steppers — “poor me, poor me, pour me a drink” — but as a smart disclosure of symptoms to mental-health professionals. Because many recovering alcoholics and drug addicts are not educated about mental illness, a lot of bad advice is doled out at meetings and/or social hours. With the best of intentions, of course. But dangerous all the same.

I was intimidated by the AA old-timers and afraid to think any differently from them, fearing that if I listened to my gut, I would become one of those people who were “too smart” for the program and relapsed continuously. Who was I to question the direction and counsel given by the guys who had been sober over a quarter of a century? They want to die, too. They just don’t talk about it, I surmised. And neither will I.

Mental illness is often a family issue. Parents, siblings, spouses and extended family provide housing, care and support, emotional and financial, sometimes to the point …

What constitutes life falling apart? The death of a beloved spouse or family member? A marriage or relationship that has withered away or perhaps ended abruptly? A job loss potentially leading to financial ruin (or so you might think right now)?

Whichever situation is closest to yours, there are some steps that you must go through to come out the other side with your heart — and new life — intact.