Charlotte Kasl, a former faculty member at Ohio University and expert on addiction, died on August 7 at her home in Missoula, Montana. She was 82 years old and had suffered from lung cancer.
A native of Missoula, Dr. Kasl started playing the piano at 7 and by the age of 17, she had fourteen piano students of her own. She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in music and a master’s degree in piano at the School of Music of the University of Michigan.
After a marriage that ended in divorce, Kasl studied piano in Europe. She returned to the United States to teach at Ohio University in Athens. There she thought there was little opportunity for career advancement in music and pursued a Ph.D. in counseling. She became a certified addiction specialist in the areas of chemical dependency and sexuality and had a private psychotherapy practice for more than 30 years in Minnesota and later Montana.
She was the author of nine books and numerous articles. Her first book, Women, Sex, and Addiction: A Search for Love and Power, was published in 1989. Her second book, Many Roads, One Journey: Moving Beyond the Twelve Steps (Harper, 1992), introduced a 16-step empowerment model for overcoming addiction and trauma and has been used in numerous treatment programs and shelters in the United States and Canada, primarily for people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.