TORONTO – Toronto-based addictions specialist Andrew Galloway couldn’t help but tear up at a recent private screening for the compelling new docu-series “Intervention Canada,” debuting Friday with back-to-back instalments on Slice.
Though he’d already lived through the drama that unfolds in the second episode – in which he helps the families of two alcoholic women stage a rare double intervention for them in Windsor, Ont. – the experience was still raw, he said.
“It’s hard to watch. You get attached to the families,” Galloway said in an interview after the screening.
“I know I’m probably, as a clinician, not supposed to get emotionally attached, but you spend eight hours with a family hearing about despair and hopelessness and they’re looking to you to try to help with this change,” he said.
“When it’s successful, it feels great. When it’s not, it doesn’t feel great because you know what that addict is going to go through.”
Galloway knows that experience first-hand because he, too, was once an addict. It was over 10 years ago, when the Toronto native was working in the finance world, hiding his alcohol and cocaine problem from his family and friends.
“When everybody else went home, I did my own thing and led a very double life or a secret life, which I’m not proud of today,” he said.
“One day (I) woke up and said, ‘That’s enough, I can’t do this anymore, I’m either going to die or I’m going to get help.’ Fortunately for me I went and knocked on my parents’ door and asked for help.”
When Galloway got sober at age 32, he volunteered at a drop-in centre for street youth, and then studied in McMaster University’s Addiction Education Program. That led to his own private practice in Toronto, through which he does counselling, treatment and interventions across Canada.
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On Season 1 of “Intervention Canada,” a spinoff of the hit Emmy-winning American series, he is featured in seven of 13 one-hour episodes. Maureen Brine is the interventionist featured in the other episodes.
“We’re trying to raise the bottom for addicts when we do an intervention, because ultimately the bottom’s dead,” said Galloway.
“Most addicts and alcoholics end up dead. They may not be 25, they may be 80 when it kills them. But it does kill them eventually, so by trying to do an intervention, we’re trying to stop that.”
Like the American version, “Intervention Canada” offers an unvarnished look at the lives of people who suffer from addiction and other compulsive behaviour, and probes how their behaviour affects their loved ones.
The subjects don’t know that they’ll face an intervention during the one-week shoot; they think they’re just being filmed for a documentary. It’s their family members and/or friends who’ve contacted the show for help.
If the addicts shoot up heroin, smoke crack cocaine or engage in other shocking behaviour, the cameras don’t shy away from capturing the footage.
“Although it’s hard to watch and be there … by the end, when you’re witnessing a family transform and someone get help that might have been dead, it’s worth whatever you see,” said producer and show runner Karen Wookey.
“What a lot of people have told me – (people) working in the industry, treatment centres and interventionists – … is that it’s a shame-based disease so (the show) has pulled back the veil and made it more accessible and allowed people to be compassionate,” she said.
Produced by Open Door Co. and Insight Productions, Season 1 of “Intervention Canada” features addicts from across the country, ranging in age from 18 to early 50s. Through the show, they were given access to three months of rehab in about a dozen treatment centres in Canada.
“Some of our biggest success stories have been with multiple-decade users,” said Wookey, who admitted that some addicts did leave treatment early.
“The people you think are going to flourish sometimes don’t and the people you think don’t have a hope transform their lives.”
While the subjects of “Intervention Canada” are offered immediate treatment, the reality is that most addicts have to wait much longer to get help, said Galloway.
“It’s getting better. More treatment centres are opening every day in Canada, but in Ontario for instance, there are lineups to get into treatment and that can be anywhere from six weeks to 20 months to get into a facility,” he explained.
“Part of the problem is we don’t have enough medical detox facilities, so with drugs like heroin or opioids or oxycodone, they don’t have enough facilities to handle people.”
According to Galloway, about one in 10 people suffer from some sort of addiction in Canada, depending on what statistics you look at.
“Intervention Canada” shines a light on those figures and shows that there isn’t just a stereotypical face to addiction.
It also offers hope for people, he added.
“Addiction doesn’t just affect the one that’s suffering, it affects the family even more,” said Galloway.
“We’re so self-centred as addicts and alcoholics that we don’t realize the hurt that’s going on around us, and so ‘Intervention’ shows families that there are other families hurting just the way you are and there’s a solution.”
Interventions, he added, should be a last-ditch effort to get a loved one the help they need, and they should never be done without an interventionist.
“It is a last resort thing, and there’s risks to interventions,” he said. “They can go wrong, (the addicts) can simply say ‘no’ and people then all of a sudden … leave them in isolation. And when (addicts) get hopeless, they can do everything from killing themselves to spiralling down even further.
“Ninety per cent of interventions are successful but that means 10 per cent aren’t.”
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