Dr. Josh Lichtman answers a listener's question about whether or not you're guaranteed to become addicted to an addictive medication if you take it enough.

China Isler—ne, Kantner—is someone I've known for a while...since I was 10, as a matter of fact. This is because we went to the same grammar school and despite the fact that the place where I grew up was somewhat sophisticated and jaded, our school was often abuzz over the fact that rock star royalty—the daughter of Jefferson Starship's Paul Kantner and Grace Slick—was among us.
Despite how China appeared—I remember her being bubbly and cool beyond belief—she had her first drink at two, was "uncomfortable" by four and was drinking regularly by 12. And so she found sobriety at an early age—in high school—and watched her life take off. Suddenly she was the youngest MTV DJ ever and discovering how much she loved acting. An acting career as well as a relapse followed—after which China took a look at her life and decided what she really wanted to do was a lot more spiritual than saying someone else's lines in front of a camera. And so she became...a pastor. No, it's not the typical path for the daughter of two rock stars. But the Minister of Substance Use Disorder and Recovery at UrbanMission in Pomona is as passionate about recovery as anyone I've ever met. Sober since 1998, she's now the Faith Leader/Liaison at Facing Addiction.

A listener was told by her sponsor that because she takes anti-depressants, she isn't actually sober. Dr. Josh Lichtman gives his take.

I'm going to have to be honest here: I'm very invested in Paul Fuhr's recovery—and it's not just because I am a selfless person.

I've gotten to know Paul, you see, because he wrote me a fan email several years ago about this very podcast. How lovely was it? Well I'm a hardened soul and it made me cry. 

But here's the really fabulous part: after that email, Paul wrote a story on spec for the site I was then editing. And it was brilliant. Cut to: Paul becoming AfterParty's most prolific writer. Every story he turned in examined a different aspect of recovery in a way that was wholly original, clever, and passionate. (Side note: because Paul is incredibly modest, he never told me until we recorded this very episode that he had a Masters in English and had worked as an editor. I had been patting myself on the back for years over having "discovered" him.)

Our conversation did not disappoint. Please listen and learn how a brilliant guy with a wife, three kids, a career managing dozens of people found and then handles sobriety.

A listener's psychiatrist diagnosed her as Bipolar 2. Then she found out the psychiatrist was wrong. What is Bipolar 2 and how is it different than regular old Bipolar 1?

Aussie entrepreneur James Swanwick has been an ESPN anchor on SportsCenter, is the author of ‘Insider Journalism Secrets’ and is the co-founder of international agency, Crocmedia. He has been a print or TV journalist for 20 years, writing for newspapers and magazines in the US, UK and Australia. These include Associated Press, Sky Sports, ESPN, WPLJ radio, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney Daily Telegraph, The Sun, Sky Movie Channel, Q104FM, Loaded magazine, Woman’s Day, The Courier-Mail and much more. He also sells the coolest blue-blocking glasses around, hosts an eponymously titled hit podcast and runs any number of other successful online ventures.

But the reason I had him on the pod was to discuss his 30 Day No Alcohol Challenge, a program he developed after he decided to quit drinking because he was tired of “just existing in the world.” His program isn’t for alcoholics but for people like him—those who feel that drinking is preventing them from living the best lives they can. (Swanwick’s experience, by the by, is that he followed those 30 days of not drinking with continued abstinence; it’s now been years.)

Psychiatrist Dr. Josh Lichtman answers the question: what the hell is a co-occurring disorder?

Brandon Novak shouldn’t be alive.

The professional skateboarder, New York Times bestseller author and member of the Jackass crew has hit all the pit stops on the way to the bottom: homelessness, multiple trips to rehab, incarceration and the like. But somehow, some way, the 38-year-old from Baltimore had a moment of clarity on May 25, 2015 and nothing’s been the same since. The guy who once passed a UA in jail by using his cellmate’s urine has transitioned into a recovery evangelist, flying all over the country to help those struggling with addiction and get them into treatment. Just how serious is he about it? Well, he gives out his personal cell phone number (610-635-9092) and encourages anyone who thinks they need help to call it.

When I interviewed Novak, the Baltimore native was visiting LA where he was making a series of appearances advocating for recovery. And how’s this for irony? The hotel room where we did the interview ended up a little bit thrashed but I was the one who thrashed it. To understand how that happened, you’ve got to listen to the whole episode.

In this episode of Recover Girl, Grammy Award-winning recording artist, Sirah, joins me for a brutally honest conversation about her disturbing, crazy, wonderful life of dysfunction, addiction, crime, and music.

Ian Harvie is the groundbreaking transgender stand-up comedian whom you may have seen in the Golden Globe and Emmy Award winning TV series TRANSPARENT. In this episode of Recover Girl, Ian Harvie joined me on my couch to talk about his childhood in rural Maine, his journey to discovering his true gender identity, his recovery from alcoholism, and his new life in sobriety as a trans comic.

Actress and artist Jemima Kirke came on the podcast. Yes, those are thrilling words to write. This is not only exciting because she’s luminous, talented and plays Jessa on freaking Girls but also because she has a history with substances that you don’t hear many people share about. After a wild youth, which included multi-day benders and bouts of depression, Kirke showed up at her mom’s in early 20s, saying she was ready for rehab. She went from one treatment center to the next, finding enough fault with the program there for her to be kicked out (but not before meeting the man she eventually married, who happens to now own a sober living). After years of staying sober and doing the 12-step thing, Kirke began to question whether the one-size-fits-all philosophy about addiction applied to her. And so she had a drink. Contrary to what she’d been told, nothing bad happened. That was a few years ago and in that time, she’s watched her career rise to superstardom and embraced motherhood (in addition to the two kids she has with her husband, she is also the step-mother to his kids from a previous marriage). In this episode, we talk about self-hatred, rehabs just out to take your money and if meeting your future spouse in treatment is “trauma bonding,” among other topics.

Writer and comedian Mara Shapshay has had a life of inarguable highs and lows: Growing up outside Boston as the daughter of a sex therapist, Shapshay felt alienated as the only Jewish girl at her school (not to mention the only girl whose mother talked extensively about oral sex). After a traumatic incident in Israel, Shapshay turned to opiates and alcohol; they helped her through film school at NYU, after which she landed in LA and promptly married a gay man. Stints at rehab followed but they didn't take and Shapshay ended up homeless and living in her car. Then she randomly met Carrie Fisher and asked her for help. Next thing she knew, Shapshay was living with Fisher and helping the late actress through shock treatments. Now over a decade sober, Shapshay is a practicing Orthodox Jew married to a sober (not gay) Orthodox Jew. And she's determined to carry on Fisher's mission to spread awareness about mental health. In this episode, we discuss why mental illness carries more of a stigma than addiction, the lure of celebrity and the difference between trust and faith, among many other topics.

Author Heather King puts the rest of us to shame. She's written so many books she literally has no idea how many. She went through law school pretty much in a black out and managed to ace the bar. And she manages to embody the sort of joy that many seek and cannot find. At least part of this surely has to do with the fact that she very much walks the walk. Now sober over 30 years, King converted to Catholicism after having a crisis of faith and now writes a weekly column on arts, culture, faith and life for Angelus. It's been a long journey from the bar stools of Boston to the churches of LA and luckily King is a charming narrator. In this episode, we discuss knocking on a neighbor's door to buy beers off of him during brutal hangovers, being too cheap to become a gambling addict and weaning oneself off of romantic obsessions, among many other topics.

Interventionist, sober companion, Fix co-founder and former proprietor of Brooklyn's Loft 107 Sober Living, Joe Schrank is a somewhat controversial figure in recovery circles. While he's never been afraid to speak his mind, Schrank has just launched his most chatter-worthy business of all: High Sobriety, an LA-based "cannabis included" treatment center that offers, in its own words, "harm reduction through an innovative medication assisted program." The first of its kind in the United States, High Sobriety is aimed at those people who Schrank feels would be dead if they had to abstain from all chemicals—that is, those who try sobriety and end up with a needle in their arm. In this episode, Schrank discusses his own sobriety, how the US is conservative in its approach to recovery and why the issue of harm reduction isn't as simple as it first seems, among many other topics.

Marketing guru Joe Polish can't simply be described as a marketing guru. The founder of ILoveMarketing and the Genius Network, Polish is one of the world's leading business coaches (this can happen when Richard Branson is one of your clients) and runs several exclusive mastermind groups. But now Polish has found his true passion: enlightening the world about recovery—in particular the way making art can help addicts. Hence his project, Artists for Addicts. In this episode, we discuss getting down to 105 pounds when freebasing cocaine, the insidious nature of sex addiction and how Artists for Addicts is helping to change the global conversation about how people view addicts, among other topics.

Former TV news journalist Rob Koebel's future looked bright: he'd won an Emmy and worked his way up to being a reporter at a Wisconsin TV station. Then, in 2012, his ex-wife, a news anchor named Christi Paul who had worked for CNN and HLN, released a book called Love Isn't Supposed to Hurt about her marriage to an abusive drunk—Koebel (though in the book his name is changed to Justin). This set Koebel off on the bender to end all benders—an event which culminated in him getting busted for peeing outside an Apple store. He was well enough known in Wisconsin for this incident to make the papers and as a result he lost his job. But Koebel didn't want that to be the end of his story so he got sober and then packed up his bags and made his way to LA, where he's landed acting roles in everything from Eastbound and Down to Under The Dome. In this episode, we talk about what it's like to sell your Emmy and finding new dreams after your original ones were shattered, among other topics.

Ryan Hampton was all set up for a career in politics: he made his first political donation at the age of 12, met Bill Clinton at the age of 13 and worked for Al Gore and Janet Reno while in college. All sounds rosy, yes? Well, the reality is that his childhood had been anything but (Hampton's dad not only went to prison but kept his kids in the dark about it for years). After a hiking injury at the age of 23, Hampton became hooked on hydrocodone and, after being labeled a "drug seeker," he—like many others—turned to heroin.

While he was lucky enough to find sobriety, other people he knew weren't so lucky and he in fact lost three close friends to addiction in his first year clean. That's when he decided to turn back to his first love. After being elected as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in July, 2016, Hampton drove out to Philadelphia, interviewing people whose lives were affected by addiction along the way. It was during that trip (which he documented for HuffPo) that Hampton was invited to meet with the President's domestic policy advisors to discuss his mission and since then, he's continued to call attention to the prevalence of addiction. In this episode, we talk about how to handle finding out that your dad has a secret life and why pill addicts turn to heroin, among many other topics.

Regular listeners will notice something unusual here: an entirely new show! I am launching a new project, Writing Issues, where I'll be interviewing authors about their struggles and successes and in order to get it in people's hands (er, ears), I am inserting one of the interviews here as a special episode. The guest, Patrick O'Neil, is not talking about his issues but about his writing career. It's a short episode where he discusses how Ryan Gosling was going to play him in a movie; I hope you enjoy it and if you don't, I promise that the next episode will bring us back to our regularly scheduled programming. Patrick's bio, in brief:

Patrick O’Neil is the author of the memoir Gun, Needle, Spoon and an excerpted in part French translation titled: Hold-Up (13e Note Editions). His writing has appeared in numerous publications including Juxtapoz, Salon, The Weeklings, Fourteen Hills, The Nervous Breakdown, and Razorcake.

Patrick is a contributing editor for the NYC-to-California-transplant-post-beat-pre-apocalyptic art, writing, and music anthology: Sensitive Skin Magazine. He is a regular contributor to the recovery website: AfterPartyMagazine, a two-time nominee for Best Of The Net, and a PEN Center USA Professional and Mentor. Starting in 2017, Patrick will be the Coordinator for Why There Are Words, a Los Angeles reading series.

Regular listeners will notice something unusual here: an entirely new show! I am launching a new project, Writing Issues, where I'll be interviewing authors about their struggles and successes and in order to get it in people's hands (er, ears), I am inserting one of the interviews here as a special episode. The guest, Kristen McGuiness, has been a guest on AfterPartyPod, but here she's not talking about addiction but about her writing career. I hope you enjoy it and if you don't, I promise that the next episode will bring us back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Kristen's bio, in short: Kristen McGuiness is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestselling memoir, 51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life, which was optioned by CBS Cable with Alison Brie attached to star and Original Films attached to produce. In addition, Kristen has co-written numerous books in the genres of self-help, business, psychology, travel, memoir, and dating. She has also written for Marie Claire, AOL, Huffington Post, and The Fix, and has appeared on The Today Show, KTLA, and in USA Today. Kristen lives in Los Angeles with her husband, daughter, and dog Peter.

Newport Academy owner Jamison Monroe may look like a successful, dashing Southern gentleman and—well, he is. Not only do we rate Newport as one of the top 10 rehabs in the world but Monroe is a sought-after speaker (yep, that was him at the Aspen Ideas Festival) and frequent subject of articles. There's a reason for this: for all that Monroe was born into privilege, his inner world wasn't always so privileged and so, when he discovered in high school that all the so-called cool kids drank, he dove in head first. School expulsion, cutting, jail, suicidal ideation and many treatment centers followed but after finally getting clean and sober for good, Monroe found his life mission: he opened Orange County-based Newport in 2009 when he was 28 and a second facility in Connecticut in 2013. In this episode, we discuss what it means to be cool, how addiction is a family disease and how kids who hate rehab show up smiling at alumni events, among other topics.

Dr. Adi Jaffe is someone who's well-known in addiction and recovery circles—primarily for his unorthodox approach to recovery. A former meth addict who went to prison for dealing drugs, Jaffe cleaned up his act in rehab and spent three years in 12-step abstaining from drugs and alcohol. And then one day he thought about drinking; he talked it over with the people in his life and gave it a try. It's now 11 years later and his addiction hasn't resurfaced, despite the fact that he's sampled both pot and ecstasy during this past decade and change. During this time, he went to grad school, became a counselor and opened Alternatives Addiction Treatment, a rehab that teaches people to moderate drinking (it also shows those seeking abstinence how to achieve that). A sought-after public speaker (check out his Ted X talk here), Jaffe is the first to admit that he may be wrong about his approach to addiction but is determined to try to spark conversations that show people there are alternatives to 12-step. In this episode, we discuss why you shouldn't ride a motorcycle to make your drug deals, what it's like to stay sober in jail and how he may have just had his first spiritual experience, among many other topics.

Voice actor Maurice LaMarche is someone you've heard more times than you've possibly heard your own parents. He wasn't only the voice of the Brain on Pinky and the Brain but won an Emmy for one of the numerous characters he played on Futurama. Then there were the parts he played on a little show called The Simpsons. Have we mentioned Zootopia, The Powerpuff Girls, Rick and Morty and Team America? Though he started out as a stand-up who did impressions (in this episode alone, you can be privy not only to Orson Welles but also Peter Falk and many others), that all changed when his life took a tragic turn in his late 20s. In short, his father was murdered and Maurice's life was derailed by alcoholism. A few years later, after an intervention arranged by his wife, the younger LaMarche found sobriety. In this episode, we discuss dreaming in color, pretending you're starring in your own TV show as a kid and whether or not it's important to have A-listers at your intervention, among other topics.

Comedian Joleen Lunzer may hail from Minnesotta but she's carved her way into the LA comedy scene quite nicely. She was one of three finalists in "Loni's Laugh Off" and produced the LA comedy show "Dissecting the Set." The journey to where she is now—happily married and the doyenne of the website PaleGurl—hasn't, however, been without its tribulations. After following a "slutty" boyfriend to Arizona, Lunzer ended up briefly institutionalized in a place where, on her first night, her teenage roommate threatened to kill her (a worker at the institution slept in between them as protection). Managing OCD has made some things challenging—after checking to make sure a door is locked, she has to touch the handle in a certain way to confirm that all is okay—but she's now got the condition under control and and is sitting atop four years of sobriety. In this episode, we discuss how pale skin fares during heat waves, punching a guy over a cab and just what a bad idea it is to drink while taking antidepressants, among many other topics.

Entrepreneur Khalil Rafati is arguably the least likely entrepreneur out there. Many years ago, the former heroin and crack addict left Toledo, Ohio after getting into some serious scrapes with the law. He ended up living in a shed in Malibu where he and a roommate shot drugs by the light generated by Fast Times at Ridgemont High (which they played over and over again on a VCR that was powered by electricity they were siphoning from next door). Finally washing ashore at Pasadena Recovery Center, Rafati got sober but still found himself unfulfilled and awash with anxiety and the feeling that his life wasn't happening the way he'd hoped. After filling up on Tony Robbins and getting inspired by Oprah, he set about changing that, opening first a Malibu Sober Living and then SunLife Organics, a juice shop that had lines out the door from day one and has now spread to numerous other locations. Now Rafati is sharing his unlikely success story in his just released memoir, I Forgot to Die (available on Amazon as well as at SunLife). In this episode, we discuss what happens when a combination of ecstasy and pills changes your life, what it feels like to be able to buy your mom a house and how to let go of the sad story you tell yourself, among many other topics.

Author Sam Polk has had an interesting journey to authorship. The former hedge fund manager had traveled what many would consider the picture perfect upward trajectory journey, escaping the confines of a "Willy Loman-like dad" and landing at Columbia University. But an addiction to drugs and alcohol, among other vices, helped him get kicked out. No matter! He landed on Wall Street, where he quickly rose to the top. But then he realized, as some do, that the top was empty and that his lifelong belief that enough money would cure all that ailed him wasn't true. And so he left Wall Street, began working on a book about it and sent off a blind query to the New York Times about how sick his money obsession had made him. This piece, For the Love of Money, immediately went insanely viral and his book (also called For the Love of Money) snatched up by Scribner. It's no wonder; the book is impossible to put down and takes the reader to when his final Wall Street bonus was $3.6 million and he was, as he wrote in the Times, "angry because it wasn’t big enough." He was 30.

Times have changed for the happily married, LA-dwelling father of two, who's been sober for 14 years and is now the cofounder and CEO of Everytable, a social enterprise that sells fresh, yummy food at reasonable prices and the founder and Executive Director of Groceryships, a nonprofit that helps low-income families struggling with food-related illnesses. In this episode, we talk about our societal obsession with money, how many Wall Street-ers want out but are trapped in gilded cages and the break up that led him to bottom out, among many other topics.