Calgary’s fourth annual Recovery Day was held at Olympic Plaza on Sunday. The event was created to provide venues for people to gather and publicly step out to talk about their addictions.
“Alcoholism just about killed me,” said Vancouver author Mike Pond at the event. “I ended up losing everything. I lost my home. We had a home on the lake in Penticton. I lost my practice. I lost my family.
“I lost my dignity and I ended up in the downtown on the east side, homeless and penniless.”
Pond is a therapist who helped people battle addictions for decades. But in his 40s, alcohol abuse took hold of his life.
“I have a genetic predisposition. My dad was an alcoholic, as was my grandfather. I am the oldest of four and three of us have addiction problems and mental health problems. I worked a lot with trauma victims and I wasn’t even realizing how much that was affecting me.”
Now Pond is on a mission to promote evidence-based addiction treatment. He’s written a book on addiction and his experience with traditional recovery programs. He says the 12-step model didn’t work for him.
“They are treating it more as a moral issue,” Pond said.
“It’s starting to change. Just since we wrote the book, it’s shifting. In Vancouver now—through St. Paul’s Hospital and Providence Health—they are developing a cutting-edge treatment program there. There are medications that can help with cravings. There’s medications that can help a person go through a detox without all the severe symptoms that we get.”
Read more from the chief public health officer on alcohol consumption here
Most experts in addictions say there is no “one size fits all” answer to the problem. Medications can be helpful for some people and various types of counselling can work for others.
“Everybody recovers their own way. However method they choose, I say whatever works, stick with that,” said Earl Thiessen at the event. He has gone from being homeless in Calgary to being the program coordinator at Oxford House.
Oxford House provides affordable housing for people recovering from addictions. Thiessen advises those dealing with addictions to reach out to one of Calgary’s many addiction recovery centres to get help.
“They are vital for people to have a safe place to work on themselves to deal with their trauma and most of all to be able to be themselves. They don’t have to hide behind a mask when they’re trying to survive out there dealing with their addictions. It helped saved my life. I went through Oxford House.”
Staff working at the local recovery centres say they are seeing more people coming in who are dealing with prescription drug addictions.
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“Right now the biggest thing is prescription drugs. We all know about the fentanyl and it’s getting out of hand. There’s more people that used to be heroin or morphine addicts that are now on fentanyl and they are dying,” Thiessen said.
“The pills and the alcohol mixture is a deadly combination. People are going to sleep and they’re not waking up.”
The Recovery Day event is intended to reduce the stigma surrounding the crippling dependencies. Those speaking at the event say there is still contempt towards substance users in our culture, which needs to change.
“There’s a lot of shame with addicts and alcoholics. Speaking is healing. That’s the best thing I can say and that’s what I did,” Thiessen said.
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