Sunday, March 15, 2015
CHAMPION
People can change. Addicts can recover. Families can heal.
Even if those addicts lie to their families and steal their jewelry, credit cards and car keys.
Even if they jump out of hospital windows and paralyze themselves while their mothers watch.
The message, the three speakers at the Hope for Recovery from Addiction forum wanted people who attended to know, that no matter what, recovery is possible.
The second annual forum sponsored by Alliance for Substance Abuse Prevention Saturday evening at Trumbull County Career and Technical Center was well attended. Many drug-abuse recovery agencies had tables set up outside the auditorium where the two-hour presentation took place.
Bonnie Wilson is the director of Domestic Violence and Visitation Services for Trumbull County.
She also has a 37-year-old daughter who will be in court in Montana next Tuesday on a drug charge, she told the crowd.
She realized her daughter was a heroin addict when the young woman was 20.
“It’s difficult to explain the range of emotions,” she said. “How can this happen to my child?”
She described living with that child as “hell on earth,” begging, pleading and screaming to reach her inside “a shell of a person” and wanting to believe her when she said she didn’t steal a credit card when “your gut tells you she’s lying.”
“Entire families are held hostage to the drug,” she said. “You hide your jewelry, credit cards and car keys.”
“Then there’s the stigma,” she said, of having a child who’s an addict. How do you handle it while other parents are bragging about their children’s wonderful accomplishments?
Addiction robs people of self-control, she said. But she believes her daughter will recover.
“I still have hope for my daughter,” she said. “I wouldn’t be standing here if I didn’t.”
Dr. Nicole Labor knows addiction personally and professionally.
She is an addict in recovery for 10 years, she said, and in her practice in Akron as a doctor who specializes in addiction, she sees 6,000 patients a year.
Addiction is a disease, she said — and to people who are skeptical of that, to people who believe addicts just make bad choices, she said, the answer is not so.
“There are changes in the brain,” she said, explaining that at one point, the mid-brain — the part that regulates survival — begins to tell the addict it needs the drug to survive.
“People will do anything to get one more, because that’s what their mid-brains are telling them they need to survive,” she said.
After only a few days of being sober, she said, an addict won’t feel good.
A quicker way to help get better, she said, is to promote spiritual growth and go to counseling, in particular, group counseling.
That will strengthen the frontal cortex of the brain, she said, which is the part of the brain that regulates higher reasoning.
“That is how we treat addiction,” she said.
Jeff Sanders was 20 when he was in a hospital intensive care unit detoxing.
He jumped from the window there and ended up paralyzed.
Now from a wheelchair, after battling his own addiction, he goes “behind enemy lines” of drug abuse to help addicts recover.
He speaks, and shows a video of those early days after his jump, when his mother had to help him get dressed and shampoo his hair.
She quit her job after it happened to take care of him, and yes, he said, she was there when he went out the window.
During the years that followed, Sanders earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s in community counseling. He worked for Community Solutions in Warren, the Ohio Department of Youth Services, Valley Counseling, and Compass, and is now the executive director of First Step Recovery, an alcohol and drug treatment center. The center has 16 beds for detox and 24 beds — 12 for men and 12 for women — for extended stay.
Also speaking at the forum was Kathy Parrilla with the Trumbull County Health Department. She is also the coordinator of Project DAWN, or Deaths Avoided with Naloxone.
Naloxone is an opiate overdose-reversal drug, she said, that cannot be abused. People can get a kit from the health department, but they have to set up an appointment and watch a video about how to use it and how to recognize signs of an overdose.
The drug is given nasally. People who would like a kit that contains two doses should call 330-675-2590 and hit option 3, then ask for Parrilla.