All individuals have the right to aspire toward their own personal goals and desires. At times, mental health conditions and problem behaviors, such as aggression or property destruction, can create barriers to reaching those goals.

Fortunately, a number of treatment practices exist that can assist an individual in adopting positive behaviors. If you or a loved one has been diagnosed with a mental health condition and has problem behaviors, consider talking to a mental health provider about the benefits of Positive Behavior Support (PBS).

What is PBS?

Positive Behavior Support (PBS) is a philosophy for helping individuals whose problem behaviors are barriers to reaching their goals. It is based on the well-researched science of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA). A key component is understanding that behaviors occur for a reason and can be predicted by knowing what happens before and after those behaviors.

Medical marijuana is a hot topic that has slowly made its way into politics, health care, psychiatry, and education — into society itself.

Diverse opinions on either side of the many issues in our society are common; the people in power still argue about gay marriage and abortion, religion and taxes. It’s fair enough for people to take sides, but when it comes to medical marijuana, it is worth the debate.

Like all social and political issues that start slowly and suddenly catch fire, the opinions regarding the use of medicinal marijuana are exhausting. ProCon.org, an accredited website that focuses exclusively on the use of medicinal marijuana asks the question: “Is medical marijuana an effective treatment for depression, bipolar disorders, anxiety, and similar mood disorders?”

Let’s find out.

This month I had the pleasure of talking to Joe Pantoliano about his recently published book Asylum: Hollywood Tales from My Great Depression: Brain Dis-Ease, Recovery, and Being My Mother’s Son. Below, he discusses everything from stigma toward “brain dis-ease” to his personal struggles with and recovery from the “seven deadlies.”

Pantoliano is also the founder of No Kidding, Me Too! (www.nkm2.org), a nonprofit organization “whose purpose is to remove the stigma attached to ‘brain dis-ease’ through education and the breaking down of societal barriers.” He produced and directed the documentary No Kidding! Me 2!!, an intimate look at the experiences of Americans living with mental illness.

Pantoliano has more than 100 movie, TV, and stage credits, and won an Emmy Award for his work on “The Sopranos.” His first book, the memoir Who’s Sorry Now? The True Story of a Stand-up Guy, was a New York Times bestseller. He was born in Hoboken, N.J., and today lives in Connecticut.

When relationships — whether romantic or platonic — fall apart, we are left trying to navigate the pain while picking up the messy pieces.

However, before we can focus on the next chapter, we still may need to dwell on the whats, the whys and the hows of all that unfolded.

How do we tie up the loose ends? How can you prevent yourself from playing the game of ‘what could have been?’

You can do that through a process known as closure. Even if you can’t obtain closure with the other person involved, you can do it with and for yourself. It’s a way to come to terms with what was lost, and a way to find your inner strength and resiliency to move forward.

I wake up at the same time every single day. It is 6 a.m. The birds sing outside my single-paned window, and my partner sleeps beside me. I close my eyes and work to will myself back to sleep: It would be nice to sleep until 8 a.m., maybe even 9 a.m. But I get frustrated and I get anxious and soon I have made my way to the kitchen where I make myself strong coffee and sit in front of my laptop.

But I’m forgetting something. It’s important, I’m sure of it.

I sip my coffee, turn on my laptop, and remember: My pills.

I cannot forget to take my pills. Disastrous things happen. Things I try to forget and things that keep me up at night. It’s never easy living with bipolar disorder but the medication keeps me stable, most of the time, and that is invaluable in and of itself.

Recovering from an addiction is probably one of the most difficult tasks a person can do in their lifetime. There is a whole industry that specifically addresses helping people overcome an addiction, whether it be from a drug, alcohol, or now, even a behavior.

Drug and alcohol addiction remain a serious problem in this country, as well as many others. Surprisingly, nearly 75 percent of all adult illicit drug users are employed, as are most binge and heavy alcohol users, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. In the United States, it’s estimated that companies and organizations lose up to $100 billion a year due to employee alcohol and drug abuse, according to the The National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information. The destruction to a person’s private life, relationships, friends and family is often immeasurable.

Substance abuse and alcohol abuse treatments are effective and do work. Not only does it help the abuser, it also begins the recovery process to help them repair their relationships with others.

You may know that Sigmund Freud, the famed founder of psychoanalysis, had a fascination with cocaine and abused it for many years.

But you might not know these three facts that relate to Freud’s longstanding interest in cocaine. Howard Markel, M.D., Ph.D, professor of medical history at the University of Michigan, documents all this and more in his comprehensive, beautifully written book An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted and the Miracle Drug Cocaine.

1. Freud was initially attracted to cocaine because he wanted to help a close friend.

One of Freud’s dearest friends, Dr. Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, was heavily addicted to morphine, and Freud initially believed that cocaine could cure him. A brilliant man and talented doctor, Fleischl-Marxow had an accident while doing research at the age of 25. He “accidentally nicked his right thumb with a scalpel he was applying to a cadaver,” according to Dr. Markel.

This seemingly minor wound turned into a horrible infection and the thumb had to be amputated.

As a recovering drunk myself, I was especially interested in the new memoir, Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety by Sacha Z. Scoblic, a writer in Washington, DC, and a contributing editor to The New Republic.

I thought I’d ask her more about what she thinks about life without booze.

1. If you knew all that you do today, what would you have done differently your first year of sobriety?

Sacha: The first year of sobriety is riddled with basic epiphanies most adults have sooner than do addicts (like: Paying bills is not optional and I don’t have to drink just because it’s Arbor Day) as well as turbulent emotions rising to the surface after years of self-medication through alcohol, drugs, and denial. And then there’s this feeling that no one understands your loss, cravings, or anxieties, because all of your friends and acquaintances are drinkers and users, which leaves you alone in the harsh glare of sobriety — chain-smoking and mainlining Diet Coke. So, if I could do my first year differently, I’d go to rehab.

Take a minute and answer this question: Is anyone really normal today?

I mean, even those who claim they are normal may, in fact, be the most neurotic among us, swimming with a nice pair of scuba fins down the river of Denial. Having my psychiatric file published online and in print for public viewing, I get to hear my share of dirty secrets—weird obsessions, family dysfunction, or disguised addiction—that are kept concealed from everyone but a self-professed neurotic and maybe a shrink.

“Why are there so many disorders today?” Those seven words, or a variation of them, surface a few times a week. And my take on this query is so complex that, to avoid sounding like my grad school professors making an erudite case that fails to communicate anything to average folks like me, I often shrug my shoulders and move on to a conversation about dessert. Now that I can talk about all day.

Here’s the abridged edition of my guess as to why we mark up more pages of the DSM-IV today than, say, a century ago (even though the DSM-IV had yet to be born).

Former nightclub owner Nicholas Kardaras died ten years ago. That’s right. For a few minutes his pulse was flat. Then he “pulled a Lazarus” as he describes it. He was revived and clung to life for a bit with the help of a respirator. When he finally emerged from his coma, he was a changed man.

Plato, Pythagoras, and the other ancient Greeks saved him. That’s what he says in his new book, How Plato and Pythagoras Can Save Your Life. A drug addict living the glamorous life, rubbing elbows with the likes of John F. Kennedy, Jr., Tom Cruise, and Brooke Shields, he decided to turn all of his time and energy toward ancient Greek philosophy?

Why?

Researchers using their own classification and rating system in order to try and assess a drug’s overall harmful effects — not to oneself, but to society as a whole too — recently published their findings. Here’s what they found, according to various news outlets:

The Most Dangerous Drugs? Alcohol, Heroin and Crack—in That Order
TIME – Catherine Mayer

Alcohol is more harmful than heroin or crack: study
New York Daily News

Study: Alcohol ‘most harmful drug,’ followed by crack and heroin
CNN International

Experts: Alcohol More Harmful Than Crack or Heroin
WebMD – Tim Locke

If you just read the headlines, you’d think the study showed that the most dangerous drug available today is alcohol, based upon clinical or government data.

It’s easy to say that, too, because that’s what the authors also said in their study (published in The Lancet medical journal):

[H]eroin, crack cocaine, and metamfetamine were the most harmful drugs to individuals, whereas alcohol, heroin, and crack cocaine were the most harmful to others. Overall, alcohol was the most harmful drug (overall harm score 72), with heroin (55) and crack cocaine (54) in second and third places.

Ah yes, that little thing we like to call complexity rears its ugly head. And oops, did we mention there’s no actual research data in the study?

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