Resources & Readings 

LOCAL RESOURCES

Maine NAMI Crisis and Support Resource List includes options for 24/7 phone call and text crisis response, with referral for emergency in-person evaluation if needed. Also lists Maine treatment centers for inpatient substance use or mental health treatment.

Alcoholics Anonymous Maine Central Service Office (includes meeting directory) I'll let these folks speak for themselves!  

Narcotics Anonymous in the State of Maine (includes meeting directory) And these folks too.

The Portland Recovery Community Center is excellent and ever-evolving. All of their programs and services are free, including individual peer recovery coaching. If you’re elsewhere in Maine, here is a map of all recovery community centers in the state. 

Community Harm Reduction Organizations: 

These groups offer Narcan/Naloxone, safe supplies, peer-led education, advocacy and more.

Maine Access Points (focuses on rural Maine)

Needlepoint Sanctuary (Bangor, Milo, Portland, Waterville)

Church of Safe Injection / The Sanctuary (Lewison and southern Maine)

City of Portland Public Health harm reduction services: syringe services, overdose prevention and response, Narcan/Naloxone, test strips, sharps disposal.

Commonspace peer support and recovery programs nurture community among members. "People, place, and purpose" have been called the "3 P's" in mental wellness, and Commonspace's work serves them all. 

The Maine Opioid Response Initiative offers an ongoing seminar series on opioid use in Maine and the state government’s efforts toward prevention, harm reduction, overdose response, treatment, and support for recovery.

Maine Department of Health and Human Services Stakeholder Advisory Committee

Maine DHHS solicits input from stakeholders including service providers, clients, client families, and other community members. Consider joining their mailing list to be invited to comment on relevant state legislation and to attend DHHS listening sessions. 

MENTAL HEALTH AND MENTAL HEALTH TREATMENT

Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health by Thomas Insel. 

Insel’s description of the state of mental health treatment is so devastatingly true that I wish all lawmakers would read it. I disagree with him about the role of managed care and insurers in fixing it, however.

   For a video primer on these problems, watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, S9 E18, “Mental Health Care” (July 2022). 

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became The New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser. 

If you’ve ever felt that organizations’ programming for mental wellness was missing the mark–maybe even intentionally so–Purser explains why. 

Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age by Bruce Roberts-Vaughn. 

“Neoliberalism” is a description of the economic and political situation of the past several decades. The author is a pastoral counselor, but his observations about what neoliberalism does to people’s lives and selves is relevant to any provider. (Beware: here be dense theory!) 

Everything Isn't Terrible: Conquer Your Insecurities, Interrupt Your Anxiety, and Finally Calm Down by Kathleen Smith. 

The only self-help book to make this list! Enough said. 

The Psychotherapy Action Network: An advocacy organization for therapists and psychiatrists.  

PsiAN unites around psychodynamic-type approaches, but much of its work is about advocating for the profession’s integrity rather than any particular clinical model. PsiAN seeks to protect the practice of therapy from encroachment by financial interests (which I consider a moral injury). 

ADDICTIONS

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. 

This book places addiction, and deaths due to addiction, in context of economic realities for people who aren’t highly educated or affluent. 

In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction by Gabor Mate. 

The author is a doctor at the forefront of Vancouver, Canada’s harm reduction approach to addiction treatment. His own persistent addiction to buying classical music CDs demonstrates how differently addiction can manifest in individuals.  

PBS documentary Prohibition by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. 

Several clients have asked me why alcohol is legal, given all its proven risks. Cannabis, many feel, is far less dangerous, but only now is beginning to be legalized. There may be no good answer to this question. However, this series explains how alcohol achieved permanent acceptance in the US–a story that informs my thinking on drugs that are illegal today. 

Drunks: The Story of Alcoholism and the Birth of Recovery by Christopher Finan. 

More on the American history of drinking problems and attempts to address them, beginning in the 17th century. 

Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction by Shira Hassan.

Hassan shares her own expertise as well as conversations with numerous others involved in harm reduction efforts nationwide. Liberatory harm reduction centers autonomy and empowerment as opposed to monitoring and control. 

WORK

Do What You Love: And Other Lies About Success and Happiness by Miya Tokumitsu

This book exposes exploitation in the notion that work is supposed to be motivated by our “love” for it. Importantly, it also shows how “do what you love” only applies to privileged workers. Nobody is expected to love cleaning public bathrooms, but people are paid to do it– thus clearly excluded from this ethos. 

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits. 

Markovits shows how meritocracy (so-called) has replaced aristocracy in maintaining social status. If you feel that it’s harder than it should be to build basic security and wellbeing for the next generation, this book helps explain why. 

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber. 

Graeber studied people who identified their own jobs as useless to society, and examined implications for the role of work in daily life. This book taught me the concept of “moral envy,” by which someone with a “do-gooder” job is scorned by others out of envy for her morally superior work. Moral envy helps explain the low compensation and poor treatment of so many service workers, as the thinking goes, “they get to do meaningful work that helps people–why would they also deserve good compensation or prestige?” High pay and status are thus consolation for those whose jobs are by contrast “bullshit.” 

Sadly, Graeber died in 2020. I would have liked to hear his analysis of job categories in society when Covid distinguished those who could work from home in safety, versus “essential” workers who did not have that privilege and were often treated as disposable. 

American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears by Farah Stockman. 

Stockman follows Indiana workers left unemployed when their unionized factory closes permanently. None of their remaining options are good. This is a close-up on the national phenomenon of deindustrialization.

Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward. 

Technically, this book is about US welfare policy. But it demonstrates how welfare administration appears to be designed to supply employers with cheap labor. The harder it is to obtain public assistance–and the worse those benefits are–the more willing people may be to work for low wages under bad conditions. 

The Belabored podcast is an outstanding source of news and analysis of contemporary labor issues across industries. Almost every episode includes interviews with workers who are organizing unions or going on strike.  

The next 2 recommendations are by Melissa Gregg, a brilliant observer of contemporary work who herself works in industry rather than higher education. 

Work’s Intimacy (2011). How the internet and social media allow work to take up ever more time and space in employees’ lives, without commensurate pay. 

Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy (2018). The deception underlying all the books, systems, and apps expected to help workers’ “time management” or “productivity”.

MORAL INJURY

The Shay Moral Injury Center at Volunteers of America is an excellent, continuously updating resource for information, training, and research on moral injury. 

Moral Injury of Health Care is an advocacy organization true to its name. Two member physicians host the Moral Matters podcast, with episodes often dedicated to mental health and psychiatric care. 

News and scholarly articles on moral injury at work: 

Moral Injury Is an Invisible Epidemic That Affects Millions (Scientific American, 2022)

Physicians aren’t “burning out.” They’re suffering from moral injury (Stat, 2018)

Reframing Clinician Distress: Moral Injury Not Burnout (Federal Practitioner, 2019) This is a more detailed academic article by the same authors as in Stat, who also host the Moral Matters podcast. 

Beyond PTSD: Moral Injury in First Responders (Firehouse, 2021)

Moral Injury in Police Work (Leb, 2019)

Compromised Conscience: A Scoping Review of Moral Injury Among Firefighters, Paramedics, and Police Officers (Frontiers in Psychology, 2021)

Burnout and Moral Injury (blog post by a classroom teacher, 2022)

Teachers Often Experience ‘Moral Injury’ on the Job, Study Finds (Education Week, 2019)

MISCELLANEOUS RECOMMENDATIONS

And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts. 

I read this book while working in a hospital during pre-vaccine Covid. This account of the denialism and chaos in the early response to AIDS still shocked me. (I was alive during the AIDS crisis, but learned about it through cartoons about the immune system shown to my elementary school class.) I was further moved when I learned that Shilts, a gay reporter living in San Francisco, took a test for HIV as soon as it was available, but delayed learning the result until after he had finished this book because he feared it would bias his writing. He did in fact have the virus, and died of AIDS at age 42. 

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour. 

So much has been written about the dubious effects of social media. Here is the one “take” I find both original and especially concerning. 

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas.

This book exposes how large corporations and ultra-wealthy individuals advance their own interests while posing as activists, advocates or donors to the less fortunate. 

Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration by Reuben Jonathan Miller. 

Miller shows in painful detail all the barriers making it near impossible to re-enter society after being imprisoned for a felony. He also relates that merely having an incarcerated family member, as he did, can leave permanent scars. 

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson. 

The Great Migration refers to the population-level movement of Black Americans from the south to the north during the 20th century. I have a PhD in US History and was still frequently surprised by this masterful and rich book. 

The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante, and their HBO adaptation for TV, My Brilliant Friend. 

The only fiction, and the only screen drama, on this list. I can’t see my way to summarizing it, so…enjoy. 

Rosalie Kuzma Genova

2022