FAMILY MATTERS
A PARENT’S
VITAL ROLE
Families need to be involved throughout
treatment, says Joss Smith in her first regular
column from the family support charity Adfam
‘Families need to recover too’
has long been
our argument within the discussion over what
recovery means. The debate about recovery
continues to rumble on in some arenas and we are
concerned to ensure that the needs of families are
present. Adfam believes that family members are
real assets in encouraging loved ones to enter
treatment and achieve sustained recovery. In order
to do so safely and appropriately, however, they
need to recover too.
Family members (whether they be parents,
partners, grandparents) have often been through their own journey of
emotional, physical and financial harms while coping with the substance user
in their lives. They deserve to be given the time and support to grow strength
and rebuild their own relationships. It is through this investment of time and
support for family members that we will truly be able to maximise their
positive influence on their loved one’s recovery.
It is crucial that we do not see these two elements – support for families in
their own right and their involvement in treatment – as separate; they are
entirely connected and indeed mutually supporting. Investment in involving
family members in treatment while neglecting the existence of the family
members’ own needs may be counterproductive and can undermine even the
best of intentions. It still seems amazing that when trying to support people
into recovery, little or no attention is paid to those who have the most affecting
relationships on the drug or alcohol user.
We know that people in recovery say that their family is the biggest factor
in their motivation to change and maintain that change. In fact a recent survey
conducted by Phoenix Futures highlighted that 70 per cent of their residential
service users reported that their mum was the main family member they
stayed in contact with and 50 per cent went on to cite their mum as the main
support in their recovery. Yet nationally we still invest little in supporting mums
and other family members who have been so affected by the substance using
behaviour of their loved one.
Over recent years we have seen a huge improvement in the responses of
drug and alcohol services to the needs of parental substance users. The last few
months have seen a lot of focus on ‘troubled families’ and the ongoing
emphasis on safeguarding issues, which must of course be addressed
appropriately and swiftly. However, by focusing so heavily on troubled families
and the needs of children, we are in danger of reducing the conversation about
families to focus solely on those considered troubled, or those children affected
by parental substance users, and neglecting others who have been affected and
the significant resource they could be.
This would be a great shame and an opportunity missed – not just for the
family members or their drug or alcohol using loved ones, but also for the
treatment system. We risk missing a vital part of the puzzle while promoting
recovery: families deserve recognition of the problems they have faced and the
valuable place they could hold in their loved one’s recovery process.
Joss Smith is director of policy and regional development at Adfam.
www.adfam.org.uk
Family support |
Family matters
May 2012 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| 19
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
drugs paraphernalia after he’d died. By this time somebody must have looked
at him and realised there were no puncture marks, but it didn’t stop the
police from shouting at me.
I knew that he’d died – it was like a sixth sense. My husband went in and
found him. I was outside on my knees, absolutely hysterical. If I’d have gone
into that flat I’d have barricaded us both in and I would have tried to make
him better. Nobody would have taken him away.
Because he died suddenly, everybody had excuses as to why it was his own
fault. The coroner actually said, ‘well we all die in the end anyway’. I wanted the
out-of-hours service to come to the inquest just to say why they had taken the
steps they did, but they were never called. The blame was firmly put on Scott,
that he’d done something that had caused his death. But he’d done nothing to
deserve it – he’d gone past the stage of being reckless.
My world just fell apart. I’d seen him every day. Every day I’d put my arms
round him, every day I’d kissed him. Every day I told him I loved him. Then
suddenly I had to accept that I wasn’t going to see him again.
By this time I’d got all this rubbish going on with the police, who thought
they were justified in their behaviour because I was the mother of a drug
user. So anything the family said was suspect.
In my area there was nothing to help me, nowhere appropriate for me to
go. I tried normal bereavement counselling, and got as far as saying Scott’s
prescription was withdrawn, and that his tolerance had fallen to his
methadone, and this person sat looking at me as if I was speaking Mexican.
They didn’t know what a script was, didn’t know what methadone was.
So I made contact with a service 60 miles away, which really saved me.
But I had to go there on the train every week – and then I had to come home
and deal with the emotion.
It’s the absolute desperate situation you find yourself in. I’ve got a stone
in a bit of ground that says that was my son. That’s it. I can’t touch him, I
can’t help him, I can’t do anything.
People used to say, ‘you lost your son – what did he die of?’ When I told
them they’d look at me as if I’d got five heads. ‘He took drugs? He was an
addict?’ But no, he wasn’t an addict when he died.
*****
One of the really hard things for us was when the pathologist report came
through the post. It told me his brain was normal and it told me the contents of
his stomach. It told me his heart was enlarged. I stood there reading this and
the realisation hit me that he’d been cut into bits. Nothing had prepared me for
that. No one had told me that the autopsy report would be quite detailed.
And there was nobody I could go to who could tell me why this had to
happen – why the receptionist of the out-of-hours service decided that Scott
shouldn’t be referred on. This wasn’t about blaming somebody, but what I’d
hoped was that by making someone look at it, it’d stop someone else’s
mother from being on her knees.
I became very critical of the industry that’s sprung up, putting people into
abstinence-based services. As soon as you do things that services
disapprove of, you become seen as codependent or an enabler.
When I first took Scott to services I realised this was a hamster wheel. I
became critical of services and wanted to know ‘why are we having three
strikes and we’re out?’ You get these ‘tough love’ people who say ‘let them
go lie in the gutter’. If someone can do tough love, great – but don’t throw
stones at me because I can’t.
People used to think I was a nice woman, but this turned me into a
dragon. I live in the shitty end of addiction. I live in a world where people get
their child or their house taken off them because they’re on heroin. When
somebody’s walking around with their belongings in a bag, how can they get
their act together? I want people to be able to access a good honest service
and find services that have a bit of compassion for the families.
Scott worked and did everything expected. But someone pulled the carpet
from under him. He didn’t die of drugs, he died of prejudice.
DDN