Jason Shiers launches our Future of Substance Use Treatment Series by asking whether addiction is only pathology—or also an attempted solution. He explores how treatment can honor disease, trauma, psychology, and neuroscience while helping people heal the needs beneath the behavior and move from recovery toward flourishing

Andrew Mullen explores secondary trauma through the body-level cost of caring. He shows how empathy, exposure, and old survival patterns can leave healers reactive or exhausted—and why boundaries, reflection, release, and self-tending are part of ethical care.

Melissa Fors Shackelford, an author and keynote speaker, discusses why trust is crucial in behavioral health, highlighting gaps in substance use treatment caused by stigma, cost, and fear. The article connects national trust trends to everyday organizational moments that build or lose trust, emphasizing that trust is built through intake, telehealth, peer follow-up, language, discharge, billing, and care consistency.