Living with Addiction

April Wilson Smith, MPH, is a PhD student in Population Health at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. Her research focuses on harm reduction approaches to people who use substances when they enter the healthcare system.

April's other interest in healthcare is interprofessional education and teamwork. Her work with the Jefferson Center for InterProfessional Education won the 2016 James B. Erdmann PhD award for Excellence in Interprofessional Education. She is currently building a large, multidisciplinary coalition to create an interprofessional education module for healthcare professionals in best practices for the care of people who use drugs when they present in the acute care setting.

April is a Certified SMART Recovery facilitator and founded the first SMART Recovery meeting in the Philadelphia city limits. She is also co-founder of the only Harm Reduction, Abstinence and Moderation Support meeting in Philadelphia.

April recently accepted a position as Harm Reduction Epidemiologist with Families for Sensible Drug Policy, which is a non-profit dedicated to helping families advocate for drug policies that save drug users' lives and keep families together and healthy.  Co-founder and President, Barry Lessin, is also a Pro Talk columnist . 

April graduated from Yale University in 1996. She was a union organizer for healthcare workers for 18 years before going back to school for her Master of Public Health, and spent ten years as Director of Organizing for Pennsylvania's largest nurses' union. She lives in West Philadelphia with her beautiful black cat, Loviefluffy.

Located in Portland, OR, Olivia Pennelle (Liv) is an experienced writer, journalist, and coach. She is the founder of the popular site Liv’s Recovery Kitchen, a site dedicated to helping people flourish in their recovery.

Liv is passionate about challenging limiting mentalities and empowering others to direct their own lives, health, and recovery. You can find her articles across the web on podcasts and addiction recovery websites, including The Fix, Recovery.org, Workit Health, and Ravishly. Liv was recently featured in VICE.

If you're interested in connecting with Liv, you can find her on Instagram. She also created a new Facebook group called Life After 12 Steps, where she proudly sees members thriving, rather than forcing themselves to do something that doesn’t work.

Additionally, Liv offers free resources on her website, including the e-book entitled Nourishing You, which is designed to give you the tools to achieve your health goals in straightforward language.

Raychelle Lohmann has been a counselor since 1998. She has done extensive research in the domain of anger management and careers. She is a published author, blogs for US News & World Report, and enjoys speaking and presenting at conferences and facilitating workshops.

As a school counselor, Raychelle works with students regarding personal/social, academic, college and career issues. Additionally, she assists parents and teachers with adolescent and parenting concerns, as well as works collaboratively with parents and teachers to assist students with academic progress.

Raychelle is an active member of the American Counseling Association, American School Counseling Association, and National Career Development Association. She is a National Board Certified Counselor and a Licensed Professional Counselor in the states of NC and SC. Additionally, Raychelle is a certified Global Career Development Facilitator.

Mike Pond is a Vancouver, Canada-based psychotherapist, in-demand speaker, author and advocate for compassionate, evidence-based treatment for all who suffer from substance use disorders. Pond’s riveting account of his own trip to rock bottom and back gives him unique empathy as a therapist. He has experienced our flawed treatment system from the inside out.

After two decades of private practice, Pond thought he knew all there was to know about treating addiction. But through his own life-threatening battle with alcoholism, he learned he knew next to nothing. Worse, what he knew was just plain wrong. He lost his practice, home and family and ended up penniless in two unlicensed, rundown recovery homes rife with systemic abuse.

For two years, Mike floated through rehabs, recovery homes and homelessness, dumpster diving, emergency wards and finally intensive care and prison. Along the way Mike Pond "the drunk" found himself shamed and stigmatized by the very system in which Mike Pond the therapist thrived. Mike Pond’s memoir Wasted: An Alcoholic Therapist's Fight for Recovery in a Flawed Treatment System was released this spring in the U.S. and is available in Canada. The book was excerpted or featured in leading Canadian publications like The National Post, the Huffington Post, the Globe and Mail , Maclean's (Canada’s version of Time Magazine) and The Toronto Star.

His search for compassionate evidence-based treatment was captured in critically-acclaimed and ratings winning film Wasted, which aired on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s flagship prime-time science program, The Nature of Things. It will appear in select film festivals the fall of 2016 in the U.S. and is available for viewing at Addictionthenextstep.com

Pond sits on two national advisory committees working to ensure all Canadians receive swift access to a broad toolkit of treatment options. His advocacy has helped create Addictionthenextstep.com, which offers a free-online therapy tool called the Interactive Guide, built in collaboration with New York City’s Center for Motivation and Change. This site is exclusively for the families and loved ones of those battling a substance use and teaches an evidence-based, whole new way of communicating with the substance user, that shifts the conversation from shaming and blaming, to compassion and kindness. It’s free and can be accessed anywhere, anytime!

Pond has rebuilt a thriving practice in Vancouver, (MichaelPond.ca) where he specializes in addiction, Indian Residential School trauma, healing and recovery.

Stacey M. Rosenfeld is the author of Does Every Woman Have an Eating Disorder? Challenging Our Nation's Fixation with Food and Weight. She is a licensed clinical psychologist in New York and California. Prior to her full-time private practice, Stacey was a staff psychologist at Columbia University Medical Center in New York and at UCLA Counseling Center in Los Angeles. She is an eating disorder and substance use disorder specialist and also focuses on anxiety and mood disorders, infertility, relationship concerns, and sport and exercise psychology.

Stacey works with individuals and groups, using an approach that blends cognitive-behavioral, dialectical-behavioral, pyschodynamic, and interpersonal techniques. Her goal is to help clients address their concerns and arrive at a more comfortable and effective place in their lives.

Lesley Wirth, MA in Spiritual Psychology, and certified Recovery Coach, is an independent contractor at Practical Recovery and Restoration Inn, a beautiful trauma informed recovery center for women, located in La Jolla, CA.

With a passion for helping women who have been using as a means to cope with their emotions, trauma, and circumstances, Lesley has been in the recovery field for ten years. Working with a wide array of addictive tendencies, she believes that women undergo specific challenges when it comes to recovery, which has motivated her to work solely with the female population.

Lesley has a nationwide after-care recovery program where she helps women integrate into their home environment after treatment. Many of her clients stay with her long-term as they move from a recovery-only focused lifestyle, to one where self-actualization becomes a larger focus. Clients work through healing mind, body, and spirit, to create a life that is becomes exciting to them again and often expand into fulfilling their dreams.

In her book, Own Your Worth, A Spiritual Journey through Food Compulsion to Self-Love, Lesley outlines the process of healing the deeper aspects of shame, unworthiness, and working to overcome fear. These processes have developed into a 6 week program that has helped women to connect to their True Self and find an embodied sense of empowerment. The program has seen great success both in and out of treatment centers in California.