Addicted Children
Several books have been written by parents inspired by their children's substance abuse. They run the gamut from “cure” to tough-love "how to" to “narrative.”
Martha Tod Dudman's Augusta Gone (Simon & Schuster, 2001) is a gripping narrative about a mother's struggle to understand her teenaged daughter's manipulation, theft, drug use and disappearance from home, as well as her own guilt and doubts.
Meredith Maran's Dirty: A Search for Answers Inside America's Teenage Drug Epidemic (HarperSanFranciso, 2003) follows three addicted teens through several ineffectual treatment programs in California. The book is an idiosyncratic mix of reporting, opinion, and policy recommendations inspired by Maran's experiences with her own 23-year-old son, who maintains his sobriety as the only white minister in a predominantly African-American Baptist church. Unfortunately, his story only consumes a few pages in the book.
Former Senator George McGovern wrote the book I'm grateful I didn't: Terry: My Daughter's Line-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism, (Plume 1997). Terry, 45, stumbled out of a bar in 1994 and froze to death in a snowbank, ending a lifetime struggle with substance abuse and depression that, typically, included stretches of sobriety.
Don't Let Your Kids Kill You: A Guide for Parents of Drug and Alcohol Addicted Children (Harper Collins, 1996) provides hard-nosed “how-to” advice based on the experiences of author Charles Rubin, an advertising executive, with his two sons' addictions.
Joan Mathews-Larsen, Ph.D., wrote Seven Weeks to Sobriety: The Proven Program To Fight Alcoholism Through Nutrition (Ballantine, 1997) because her seventeen-year-old son committed suicide after he completed an in-patient alcoholism treatment program. Mathews-Larsen, a nutritionist, has developed a program to treat the biochemical roots of alcoholism.
Do you have comments about any of these books, or are there others you've read that have helped you deal specifically with a child who is abusing alcohol or drugs?