"When he was two years old, Hunter Biden was badly injured in a car accident that killed his mother and baby sister. In 2015, he suffered the devastating loss of his beloved big brother, Beau, who died of brain cancer at the age of forty-six. These hardships were compounded by the collapse of his marriage and a years-long battle with drug and alcohol addiction. In Beautiful Things, Hunter recounts his descent into substance abuse and his tortuous...

"A survival manual and a lifeline to remind parents and others they are not alone. With the pervasiveness of drugs today and death by overdose as the leading cause of death for people under 50 in the US, almost everyone has been directly or indirectly affected by this drug epidemic. Loving someone with substance abuse can be terrifying. Steve Grant shares what he learned during his own difficult journey to encourage and guide other parents who are...

Oran Canfield—son of self-help guru and Chicken Soup for the Soul creator Jack Canfield—tells his surreal story of growing up in Long Past Stopping. In this remarkable memoir, writing with a wry and cutting edge, Canfield relates tales of a childhood in flux—being buffeted about among family friends, relatives, rebels, and born-again circus clowns, in an anarchist private school, communes, and libertarian enclaves—and

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During his early teens, Jeff Bratton started using drugs. At first, alcohol and pot, but quickly he spiraled into using cocaine, ketamine, crystal meth and eventually heroin.
How could this wonderful son, loving brother, and star athlete lose himself to drugs? How could his parents be so clueless? How could his mother, the long-term head of a private school, be so blind?
"Stagli vicino", an Italian recovering addict told the author. "Stay

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When kids turn to substance abuse, parents also become victims as they watch their children transform into irrational and antisocial individuals. This harrowing scenario finds parents buckling beneath the stress, often with catastrophic consequences: divorce, career upsets, breakdowns . . . and worse.
Don't Let Your Kids Kill You is a landmark work that dares to focus on the plight of the confused, distressed parent and not the erring child....

"Love First provides clear steps for families, friends, and professionals to create a loving and effective intervention plan for helping those who have an addiction. This revised and expanded twentieth-anniversary edition adds new intervention techniques for alcohol and other drug addictions, plus contemporary insights from the authors' decades of front-line work with those who are addicted and their families. Also new are tools to help families undertake...

"Fifteen-year-old Hannah was a privileged young girl with a promising future, but that didn't stop her from sliding into an abyss of sex, drugs, alcohol, and other high-risk behaviors. Off the Rails narrates Hannah's sudden decline and subsequent treatment through the raw, honest, compelling voices of Hannah and her shocked and desperate mother--each one telling her side of the story./Fearing that they couldn't keep their teen safe, Hannah's parents...

In these pages, Katherine Ketcham brings you hard-earned wisdom about the impact of addiction on families, the relationship between spirituality and recovery, and what she deems the most important lessons of faith, hope, acceptance, and forgiveness. For parents and siblings, educators and counselorsall of us who have been witness to the disease of addictionhere is a hope-giving book that places special emphasis on the healing side of the story: living...

"Stranded in a volatile, ever-shifting family, saddled with a mercurial mother mired in crack addiction, and demeaned daily for his perceived weakness, Joseph Earl Thomas was under constant threat. Roaches fell from the ceiling, colonizing bowls of noodles and cereal boxes. Fists and palms pounded down at school and at home, leaving welts that ached long after they disappeared. An inescapable hunger gnawed at his frequently empty stomach, and requests...

"Every autumn, Kenny Porpora would watch his heartbroken mother scribble messages on balloons and release them into the sky above Long Island, one for each family member they'd lost to addiction. As the number of balloons grew, his mother fell deeper into alcoholism, drinking away her sorrows every night in front of the television, where her love of Regis Philbin provided a respite from the sadness around her. When their house was foreclosed upon,...