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From addiction to recovery

Posted on | February 3, 2010 | 4,787 views |

Addicts find help and hope right around the corner at Ohio State’s Talbot Hall

By Julia Harris

It’s the kind of story that sends chills through a parent’s heart: A young man, from a good home in a nice suburban enclave, develops a staggering addiction to heroin and ends up in a rehab facility, lucky to be alive.

The really scary part is how common the story is.

Take “Tyler,” a 21-year-old from a tidy central Ohio suburb, who graduated from drinking alcohol at parties to pilfering painkillers to injecting up to 10 bags of heroin — roughly 20 “hits” of the drug — every day.

“I was high all the time,” he said, his voice slow and halting. “The rate I was going, I’d probably be dead by now, either by the people I was messing with or by overdosing or getting in a car crash because I was driving under the influence.”

Instead, he’s very much alive and working toward a drug-free future — a future for which he credits the staff at Talbot Hall, Ohio State’s drug and alcohol addiction rehab hospital.

Tyler’s story is one the folks at Talbot see and hear every day. The chemical dependency program, housed at University Hospital East, has been around for 36 years, serving a diverse population of patients from the very wealthy to the very poor. While there is no one “type” of addict, Talbot staff estimate that most patients are between the ages of 30 and 40, and that roughly half of them have some kind of dual diagnosis: A chemical addiction coupled with another, distinct mental health diagnosis, such as depression or bipolar illness.

The facility has 24 beds for patients who need to be detoxed before they can be released, a stay that generally lasts 3 to 4 days.  Following their release, patients may be sent to Talbot’s partial hospitalization program — 8 hours a day for 7 days a week — and/or its intensive outpatient program, which meets three days a week for three hours each day.

Brad Lander, Talbot’s clinical director and a licensed psychologist, says it’s a job that never grows boring — even after 25 years.

“I like alcoholics and addicts,” he said with a smile. “I know that sounds weird. And I like that every time I think I’ve heard it all, there’s something new and wild that shows up.

“But when somebody gets sober, they change dramatically in a very short period of time — they become a completely different human being, and I like that part of it.”

In his tenure at Talbot, Lander has seen a lot of trends cycle through in terms of chemical dependency, and he says that right now they’re seeing a huge increase in the number of opiate addictions. Painkillers like Oxycontin and Vicadin are relatively easy to get, he said, because of an increase in the number of prescriptions doctors are willing to write for these drugs. For young people like Tyler, sampling from family medicine cabinets is an easy way to a quick high.

From there, it’s a not a very big step to an IV drug habit that can cost jobs, relationships, even life itself.

“Heroin is actually cheaper than prescription medications,” Lander said.

Given the surge in opiate addiction, Talbot staff created a program specifically targeted for the suite of symptoms and concerns experienced during recovery from that category of drug. The Talbot Opiate Program, just over a year old, is a six-week outpatient detox plan that covers topics on opiate addiction and treatment. It also provides a weekly three-hour support group meeting for recovering addicts to promote a sense of community and foster personal growth.

Deborah Hoy, a licensed nurse and facilitator of TOP, says the program is unique because of its two-pronged approach — medical and psychosocial. “We use a medication called Suboxone, which is an opiate married to an opiate blocker, which we slowly titrate down until there’s no medication at all,” she explained.
“At the same time, we’re teaching them about recovery living, how to handle withdrawal symptoms and how to make the kinds of positive physical, emotional, social and spiritual changes they need to avoid relapse.”

Group members are required to keep a journal of their recovery process and complete a number of assignments, such as creating a list of things for which they are grateful and drafting calendar to help avoid unstructured — and thereby dangerous — times during the day.

Hoy also shares wellness information, such as diet and nutrition tips, and has begun to incorporate basic yoga poses and breathing as a means of stress and pain management,

And although the goal of any such program is complete and total recovery, the reality is that the process is imperfect. As Lander says, “It’s probably safe to say that 50 percent of people will relapse.

“But you have to remember that addiction is an actual physiological change in the brain that can’t be undone. We like to say, you can turn a cucumber into a pickle but you can’t turn a pickle back into a cucumber.”

No one knows about being a “pickle” better than former patient Tyler, who did two stints in Talbot before emerging a humbler and more grateful young man. “I’ve been out close to a year, clean and sober the whole time,” he said. “I work hard to stay physically, spiritually and mentally fit. I kind of feel like an old man emotionally, but I have a clean bill of health, and this is the time in my life when I’m trying to find who I really am.”

The ties that bind

Addicts aren’t the only ones affected by their drug problems — friends and family also become casualties of the disease. That’s where Candace Hartzler comes in.

As Talbot Hall’s family advocacy counselor, Hartzler works to soothe what she calls “the emotional ripples” that touch everyone close to a chemically dependent person.

“It’s very normal for a family member to take the addict’s behavior personally, the ‘why are you doing this to me’ sorts of questions,” Hartzler said.”We try to help people navigate those thoughts a little bit differently and understand that this is an illness and not something the addict is ‘doing’ to them.”

Hartzler works with families of Talbot patients and also conducts weekly  informational and support groups as part of the Family Alcohol and Drug Education Series, which are open to the public.

Topics in the six-week series, offered on a continual rotation, include understanding and coping with addiction, creating boundaries and managing stress. The group meets every Thursday at Talbot from 6-7:30 p.m.

“I’ve had so many parents of people Tyler’s age tell me they had no idea their son or daughter was an addict, when the illness had been going on for two, sometimes three years,” Hartzler said.

“It’s important to talk about what they might be doing unintentionally to support the behavior and how they can detach a little bit.”

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