High Achiever: The Incredible True Story of One Addict’s Double Life

Book Title: High Achiever: The Incredible True Story of One Addict’s Double Life

Author: Tiffany Jenkins

Publication Information: New York, Harmony Books, 2019, 384 pp., $15.99, paperback

High Achiever: The Incredible True Story of One Addict’s Double Life, is a deeply personal and honest telling of Jenkins’ struggle with severe opioid addiction. It details how her addiction started and was maintained, her attempts to obtain sobriety, and the process of going to jail and through rehabilitation treatment. Beyond these pieces, Jenkins takes the reader on a private tour through her raw emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. For example, she describes her desperate attempts to hide her addiction through extensive lying and her motivation to keep using, despite wanting to quit. Additionally, she provides an honest look into what contextual and personal factors led to her eventual engagement in a few suicide attempts. She also explains how her personal relationships were impacted by her addiction, particularly with her boyfriend, who was employed as a law enforcement officer.

The book starts in the middle of Jenkins’ journey and takes the reader back and forth from her time in jail to the events that led up to her being incarcerated. The book then leads the reader through the residential treatment process, including her psychotherapy experiences and interactions with other patients. She also provides thorough description of her struggles and achievements to help the reader better understand what patients go through during their stay in a residential facility.

What makes this book unique and relevant to family medicine education is that the author’s brutal honesty and insight personalizes addiction and, therefore, produces empathy. This book provides a deeper understanding of addiction by giving a glimpse into the daily thoughts of someone experiencing addiction and why someone with an addiction would continue to use despite substantial suffering, isolation, and wanting to stop. It challenges common beliefs held by many people who do not suffer from addiction, such as people with an addiction just do not care, are not stopping their use because they do not want to, can just quit, or cannot function in daily life. Having this insight and information can easily be translated into family medicine because family medicine is often the place where people take their first step in their recovery journey. Also, family medicine is the place where patients obtain continuity of care during their substance use treatment and is where they follow up after treatment. Family medicine clinicians can take the empathy inspired by this story and generalize that to their patients to care for them in a new light.

Truthfully, while reading this book I found myself feeling exhausted at times. This fatigue stemmed from repeatedly reading about how the author was lying again, engaging in unhealthy behaviors once more, and not seeking help, despite being adamant she would. Although exhausting, Jenkins writes her story so honestly that it teaches the reader to understand the person suffering from addiction and how all of this could happen. The text is deeply thought-provoking at times, and a particular question I pondered while reading this book was, If I feel this drained reading the story, how exhausting was it to be Jenkins? Jenkins explains how people in her life viewed her extremely negatively once they learned the truth of what was going on with her, but that did not compare to the negative internal dialogue she experienced on a daily basis for years prior to them ever finding out.

In addition to all of this, the author delivers insight into the lack of quality and humanistic treatment she faced while in jail, some of which was illegal. Further, she describes the poor and unfair legal representation she received. Her experiences elicit an internal emotional response within the reader for her injustices. This information can be quite helpful for clinicians in family medicine in deepening empathy for patients who have been to jail and experienced improper and possibility illegal treatment. It also can be useful when understanding other mental health diagnoses that may be present in those who have been to jail, such as depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress.

In the end, Jenkins’ story provides hope to the reader. Jenkins engaged in 6 months of residential substance use treatment and her life now includes years of sobriety, employment, family, love, and posttraumatic growth. The prominent messages left with the reader are that any severity of addiction is treatable, people change, and those with substance use concerns need others to hear them, support them, and help them. These others do not just include family, friends, and specialized substance use treatment clinicians, they include family physicians as well.