Gambling addiction hurts, when you really get down to it. I guess that’s what makes it gambling addiction in the first place: the gnawing, the Need; the sense that you aren’t and can’t ever be Okay when you’re not gambling, and that nothing will be All Right until you lay your next bet.

It’s the pain that gets you, when you’re a victim of gambling addiction. It’s why you bet. It’s why you can’t stop betting. It’s why the high of a win feels so good and the low of a loss feels so awful; it’s why, in the end, gambling addiction treatment is the only chance you’ve got to get better.

Gambling addiction treatment won’t make the pain go away, but it will at least teach you how to manage it. How to live with it. How to keep it from consuming you, in a way that turns you into a shell of whoever you were or ever hoped to be. That, I suppose, is just about all anyone could ask for

What was I like before I got depression treatment? It’s one of those things I don’t like to talk about. Before I got depression treatment, I was lost, more than anything else. Lost to myself, lost to the world: estranged from anything and anyone I’d ever cared about. I was a shell, was what I was. A husk. A ghost. A miserable facsimile of anything that might ever be called a human being.

If you’ve ever experienced depression yourself, you know how it goes. The weight. The darkness. The feeling like nothing you could ever do or say or think will fix what’s ailing you; the sense that hopelessness is less a state of mind that some kind of existential truth. Depression treatment, when you’re depressed, seems like a fool’s dream, the sort of thing that isn’t and couldn’t ever be anything more than a waste of time, given how you’re so buried that you don’t even know up from down.

Like I said, I don’t much like to talk about how I was before I got depression treatment. Some walks down memory lane, after all, are best left untaken.

There’s no shame in being addicted to prescription drugs. In fact, pain killer addiction is an increasingly prevalent problem in the United States, with as many as three million Americans exhibiting symptoms of unhealthy drug dependence. If you or some you care about has succumbed to prescription drug addiction, you aren’t alone…and the only mistake you could make would be not getting the help you need to get better for good.

Prescription drug treatment can’t be effective if it isn’t sought out. As difficult as the decision to enter a prescription drug treatment center can be, it’s the most important one you’ll ever make; prescription drug treatment, when it works, will quite literally save your life.

So no, there’s no shame in being addicted to prescription drugs. There is, however, a great deal of shame in being either too proud or too scared to get the prescription drug care you need to get healed. For your own sake, let today be the day you starting putting prescription drug dependency on the run.