Lecturer to share personal experience with addiction at TEDxUCLA event

Fifteen years ago, Adi Jaffe woke up handcuffed to a hospital bed after being caught in possession of half a pound of cocaine following a motorcycle accident.

As an undergraduate student at UCLA, Jaffe made his living and his reputation by using and selling drugs. Now a psychology lecturer at UCLA, he plans to discuss his personal experience with addiction and address the stigma surrounding mental health at a TEDxUCLA event on May 30.

Jaffe said he thinks shame is a construct people create for others, and labeling people according to their disorders limits their expectations of themselves and others’ expectations of them.

As executive director of Alternatives Behavioral Health, which he co-founded in Beverly Hills in 2013, Jaffe has worked with many patients who have experienced shame surrounding addiction.

Jaffe said he regressed into drug use and apathy toward his education during his time in high school and college. He said his methamphetamine addiction began while studying for finals at UCLA.

“(Using meth) made it really easy to pass (classes) that quarter, (but) it made it really hard to graduate,” Jaffe said.

Jaffe said he eventually stopped showing up to class because of his drug use, and graduating came by chance.

“I essentially dropped out of school without dropping out of school,” he said. “That’s literally all I did: partied and sold drugs full-time.”

Jaffe was one class short of graduating with a degree in psychology, but a year and a half later a university official called to tell him he received his degree after a departmental change in curriculum.

Still, he continued using drugs. The motorcycle accident was the beginning of a chain of events to his recovery, Jaffe said.

Jaffa Jaffe, his mother, said neither she nor her late husband, both of whom lived in New York at the time, were aware of his drug abuse.

“I don’t think Adi ever lied, we just never asked the right questions,” she said.

She said she and her husband spoke to Jaffe on the phone almost every day, and they attributed his abnormal sleeping habits to the music industry career he was pursuing at the time.

Jaffe said he opened a recording studio while he was at UCLA with money he earned from dealing drugs.

His mother said by the time she found out the truth, he had already begun making an effort to end his abuse. She said he joined a rehabilitation center and began telling her every detail of his life.

“I couldn’t tell you much about the way down, but we watched him go up,” Jaffa Jaffe said. “It probably had to be his decision, and it always was. He made the decision that he wasn’t going to end up a drug addict.”

Jaffe said he faced 18 years in jail, but he began to sincerely change his habits, and after success in his rehabilitation program, he only had to spend one year in jail.

After jail, he said the only future he could pursue was in academia. He said he faced job discrimination with every application he submitted, because each one asked whether the applicant had been convicted of a felony.

The only application that did not ask the question was the one for graduate school.

Jaffe was accepted to California State University, Long Beach, where he received his graduate degree and became the first person from the school to be accepted to the UCLA doctoral program for psychology.

Dennis Fisher, Jaffe’s faculty adviser, said he thinks Jaffe is the most intelligent student who has ever participated in the department’s program.

Jaffe said he began to open up about his past following his graduate school interview.

“I was ashamed of was my life for five years, so it’s almost like (I) ended up with this gap (in my life),” Jaffe said.

Jaffe said he thinks shame is the primary factor inhibiting people from getting help. He said his goal is to normalize the conversation about mental health issues to make people less ashamed of seeking help.

“There are two things I feel like you really have to do, and that’s be very secure in who you are and … be ready to prove everyone wrong,” Jaffe said.