Using Social Media in Substance Abuse Prevention, Treatment and Recovery

I had the pleasure of presenting at the New England School of Addiction and Prevention Studies yesterday. I talked for 3 hours about using social media in the addiction field.
My throat hurt afterwards, but it was pretty fun.
I started using social media for business / marketing purposes back in 2006 as the communications specialist at Crossroads, a substance abuse and mental health agency based in Portland, Maine. Though I’m not an employee anymore, I still manage their social media and marketing efforts, and they are my biggest client in the writing lab. I was pretty lucky in that they allowed me to experiment with different ways to use social media as a platform to educate people about substance abuse and to tell stories of treatment and recovery.
I say lucky because no one else in the field was doing much at all with social media at the time. More in the addiction field are using social media now as a way to share stories of recovery, educate teens on the dangers of experimenting with drugs, or by just having a presence so that when someone needs treatment, he or she knows where to go. We need more voices from the prevention, treatment and recovery field out there in the social media world.
Following is my presentation from yesterday. Tonight, I’m doing a shortened version for an even bigger crowd. My hope is that at least one person will take something from the presentation and use it to fight the stigma of addiction, break down the barriers of treatment, and prevent a few teens from going too far with their drinking or drugging.