Defining Addiction, Part One: Abuse, Dependency, Tolerance & Withdrawal

[@cxvzf]

I really respect you for sharing your personal experience, Dr Silva. That’s incredibly valuable to hear and it certainly benefits your patients. Thanks again for your posts.

[@notonanemptymind]

Thanks for the feedback! My mission is to keep things real, and I can’t ignore any vignettes from my own life that are of incredible relevance to what I’m discussing or presenting, especially since it gives me an extraordinary degree of insight that I really couldn’t fully convey without disclosing that I’m speaking from personal experience. It just wouldn’t work; I wouldn’t be able to delve into any of the details if I were always pretending to not be talking about myself. Plus, it would be exhausting! I feel very strongly about the destigmatization of mental illness: it would be a terrible hypocrisy for me to conceal my own struggles, and so I’ve chosen to be an open book, which is how I am in day-to-day life with my friends and family, my patients, and everyone else. It’s very liberating. Thank you so much for your comment. I never know how things are going to come across.