On the stigma of addiction
Sep. 12th, 2015 02:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xiphiasThere's a closed Facebook group for counselors on the crisis text line I volunteer for, and every week, we get a discussion question or two to share and talk about if we want. How do we maintain our own sanity while doing this? How do we maintain our non-judgementality when texting with people with whom we disagree?
And this week, one of the questions is, "What can we do to help people deal with the stigma of addiction?"
I just got back from the diner, where I spent a good half hour or hour talking to Jarrett, one of the grill cooks. And he mentioned that he'd been in high school in 2004, during the height of the Melrose heroin epidemic. Over the course of ten years, something like forty kids in Melrose High have died of heroin overdoses. Most of them in a particular summer where somehow someone got a hold of and was selling 100% pure stuff, which meant that people were getting dosages ten to a hundred times what they were expecting.
My little city is twenty seven or twenty eight thousand people. The high school is about 950 people. And for many years, half a percent of the class was dying of heroin. And the city refused to talk about it. Just refused to even acknowledge it.
In 2006, my upstairs neighbors were a woman and her high-school aged daughter. The mother had been a Spanish teacher in the Melrose school system for many years, but developed brain cancer, and died that year. Melrose has a city cemetery, in which you are interred in order, in the order in which you die.
And she is buried between two of her former students.
I don't have an answer as to how to deal with addiction stigma. I just live in a city that refuses to do.
And this week, one of the questions is, "What can we do to help people deal with the stigma of addiction?"
I just got back from the diner, where I spent a good half hour or hour talking to Jarrett, one of the grill cooks. And he mentioned that he'd been in high school in 2004, during the height of the Melrose heroin epidemic. Over the course of ten years, something like forty kids in Melrose High have died of heroin overdoses. Most of them in a particular summer where somehow someone got a hold of and was selling 100% pure stuff, which meant that people were getting dosages ten to a hundred times what they were expecting.
My little city is twenty seven or twenty eight thousand people. The high school is about 950 people. And for many years, half a percent of the class was dying of heroin. And the city refused to talk about it. Just refused to even acknowledge it.
In 2006, my upstairs neighbors were a woman and her high-school aged daughter. The mother had been a Spanish teacher in the Melrose school system for many years, but developed brain cancer, and died that year. Melrose has a city cemetery, in which you are interred in order, in the order in which you die.
And she is buried between two of her former students.
I don't have an answer as to how to deal with addiction stigma. I just live in a city that refuses to do.