Talking Addiction & Recovery: Podcast Review

What if understanding addiction requires us to look beyond the behavior and listen more carefully to the human experience underneath it? Talking Addiction & Recovery, created and hosted by clinician Andrew J. Schreier, brings professional knowledge, lived perspectives, and candid conversations together to deepen how we think about addiction, healing, and the many forms recovery can take.

What is the Podcast About?

Talking Addiction & Recovery is an educational podcast devoted to exploring addiction and recovery from perspectives that often extend beyond what listeners encounter in textbooks or conventional clinical discussions. Created as a follow-up to Schreier’s book Addiction & Recovery, the show draws on his experience in substance use counseling, mental health, clinical supervision, and gambling-related concerns. Through interviews, professional discussions, and focused explorations of specific issues, it examines the realities surrounding addiction while considering how individuals, families, professionals, and communities can respond with greater knowledge and understanding.

The scope is deliberately broad. Episodes have addressed substance use, gambling, trauma, stigma, grief, harm reduction, mental health, prevention, behavioral healthcare systems, family experiences, and the challenge of building a meaningful life in recovery. Guests bring different kinds of expertise to these conversations, including clinical knowledge, research, advocacy, professional practice, and personal experience. Rather than presenting recovery as a single formula, the podcast creates room for complexity, encouraging listeners to consider the many biological, psychological, social, cultural, and personal factors that can shape addiction and healing.

Podcast Details

Category: Mental Health
Frequency: Weekly
Starting Year: 2019
Language: English

Podcast Creator

Core Theme

At the heart of Talking Addiction & Recovery is the idea that addiction cannot be understood simply by looking at a substance, behavior, or diagnosis. The show repeatedly widens the frame, exploring trauma, shame, relationships, gambling, grief, identity, purpose, healthcare, culture, public policy, and the systems surrounding people who seek help. Recent conversations about trauma treatment, individualized recovery, purpose, gambling, and behavioral healthcare illustrate this approach. Recovery becomes more than stopping something harmful. It also involves understanding what sustains change and what allows a person to build a meaningful life beyond the problem itself.

A second theme is the rejection of overly narrow ideas about what recovery must look like. Different people may require different combinations of professional care, social support, personal meaning, practical resources, and therapeutic approaches. The podcast also pays close attention to language and stigma, including how labels and assumptions can create barriers to seeking help. Across its varied topics, a consistent philosophy emerges: effective responses begin with curiosity about the whole person rather than reducing someone to an addiction, symptom, or past behavior.

Podcast Takeaways

Some key lessons from the Podcast:

• Recovery is deeply individual: There is no single pathway that adequately represents every person’s circumstances, needs, values, and experience of change.
• Addiction exists within a larger human story: Trauma, mental health, relationships, grief, environment, identity, and purpose can all be relevant to understanding addictive behaviors and recovery.
• Language has consequences: Stigmatizing labels and careless assumptions can deepen shame and discourage people from seeking support, while thoughtful language can create space for dignity and engagement.
• Stopping a behavior is only part of recovery: Sustainable change can also involve rebuilding identity, relationships, meaning, health, connection, and a life that feels worth protecting.
• Behavioral addictions deserve serious attention: The show’s recurring exploration of gambling demonstrates why addiction conversations should extend beyond alcohol and other substances.
• Professionals benefit from perspectives beyond formal training: Research and clinical education matter, but listening to lived experience, practitioners, advocates, and people working in different systems can reveal important dimensions of recovery.
• Hope becomes stronger when paired with practical understanding: Compassion and encouragement are important, but the podcast continually connects them with education, informed care, prevention, and concrete conversations about how change happens.

Podcast Strengths

One of the strongest qualities of Talking Addiction & Recovery is its ability to combine professional substance with approachable conversation. Schreier can move from clinically relevant subjects to personal stories without making the show feel like a lecture, while the diversity of guests keeps its perspective from becoming overly narrow. The range is particularly valuable: episodes can move from trauma and EMDR to gambling policy, harm reduction, yoga in sobriety, grief, stigma, family recovery, and the role of purpose in healing. The podcast also extends its educational mission by making select episodes available as continuing education opportunities for licensed and certified professionals. This combination of practical relevance, varied perspectives, and accessible discussion makes the program useful to both professionals and general listeners.

Who This Podcast Is For

Talking Addiction & Recovery is well suited to people in recovery, family members and loved ones, counselors, therapists, addiction professionals, educators, healthcare workers, community leaders, students, and anyone seeking a more nuanced understanding of addiction. It may be especially valuable for listeners who are dissatisfied with simplistic explanations and want to examine recovery through multiple lenses. Professionals can encounter ideas and experiences that complement formal education, while people outside the field can gain a clearer understanding of the complexity behind addiction, treatment, stigma, and long-term change.

Why Should You Listen To This Podcast?

You should listen to Talking Addiction & Recovery if you want conversations that treat addiction as a complex human issue rather than a problem with a single explanation or solution. Its value lies not in promising easy answers but in introducing better questions and a wider range of perspectives. Schreier’s clinical background provides a strong foundation, while guests continually expand the discussion through expertise, advocacy, research, and personal experience. Whether you are supporting someone you love, working professionally in behavioral health, navigating recovery yourself, or simply trying to understand the subject more intelligently, the podcast offers an extensive library of conversations that can challenge assumptions and deepen compassion.

Questions This Podcast Helps Us Explore

1. What changes when we understand addiction as part of a whole person’s life rather than as an isolated behavior?
2. How can people build a meaningful identity in recovery that is larger than the addiction they experienced?
3. Where does stigma still influence the way families, professionals, healthcare systems, and communities respond to addiction?
4. How can treatment respect individual differences while still drawing on sound clinical knowledge and evidence?
5. What does lasting recovery require beyond simply ending a destructive behavior?

Concluding Thoughts

Talking Addiction & Recovery succeeds because it is willing to stay with the complexity of its subject. Addiction intersects with far more than substances alone, and the podcast makes room for conversations about trauma, gambling, mental health, relationships, shame, purpose, healthcare, culture, prevention, and the systems people encounter when seeking help. By bringing those dimensions together, Schreier creates a resource that can educate without losing sight of the individuals whose lives sit behind the terminology.

Perhaps the show’s most valuable invitation is to remain curious. Recovery rarely fits neatly into one theory, one intervention, or one person’s experience, and understanding grows when we are willing to listen across those differences. For anyone touched personally or professionally by addiction, Talking Addiction & Recovery offers an opportunity to question assumptions, expand knowledge, and consider recovery not merely as an escape from harmful patterns, but as the continuing work of creating a healthier and more meaningful life.

→   You can listen to Talking Addiction & Recovery on Apple Podcasts and other leading platforms, or explore more at their website. The podcast is also a FREE platform for continuing education for certain helping professionals; meaning you can listen to episodes at your own convenience and earn CEUS at no cost.

Chief Editor

Tal Gur is an impact-driven creator at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 life goals around the globe. Tal's journey and recent book, The Art of Fully Living, inspired him to found Elevate Society.