About

My struggles with mental health started at the age of 9, and by age 12, I was already becoming a compulsive gambler.

Despite these hurdles I earned my medical degree from Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center - New Orleans in 2009. After returning to Louisiana in 2014 my addiction and mental health issues spiraled.

In 2018, I started my journey through the process this site describes. I called them myself, which is how a lot of people get here and is not the version you usually hear about. A program I had never heard of before I picked up the phone. An evaluation that took days. Ninety-four days of treatment, and that was only the first trip. There were rechecks after it, a week here, two weeks there, six weeks once, all of them before I finally stopped gambling. Years of monitoring, and everything that comes with it: the screens, the reports, the paperwork, the phone calls, the cost. What I know about it comes not only from my medical education but from years of living inside it.

Nobody told me what any of it would be like. Not because anybody was hiding it, but because no one whose job it is to explain it had been through it, and no one who had been through it was in a position to explain it. That gap is the whole reason this exists.

These days I work in medicine part-time. I spend the rest of my time speaking about addiction and recovery, and educating professionals participating in or administering these programs, in both one-on-one and group settings.

I’ve been happily married to Tracey Vicknair Naquin since 2024. Her love and support mean the world to me. I have two beautiful step-daughters and three fur babies: Daisy, Clyde and Obi.