The Dufferin/Caledon Drug Strategy hired AOS to produce a video series to promote and inform the public for Overdose Awareness Month. Their focus group agreed that hearing stories from real people rather than social workers or doctors would be most beneficial. Each video features one client telling their personal story of their journey with addiction and the stigma associated with drug addiction. Some chose to stay anonymous and were filmed as silhouettes while others were more open. Throughout this production sensitivity was the main priority. The questions for the interviews were carefully written, the camera work and the editing process was respectful of the individuals, and told their story in a way that made them proud.
Drug Stigma Awareness – Episode 2
Drug Stigma Awareness – Episode 3
Drug Stigma Awareness – Episode 4
Drug Stigma Awareness – Episode 5
Drug Stigma Awareness – Episode 6
We are proud to tell stories that matter. Learn more about our approach to stakeholder storytelling and healthcare photography and video production.
Full video transcript:
I went off on leave because of mental health reasons and the addiction portion came up… …in a private counseling session, and it had to be relayed back to my work. They threw out the fact that I had mental health issues and all the focus was on addiction. I was actually told that addiction should be a short term illness, not long term. And I felt like people had given up on me. We judge people, this is what we do in human nature, that we judge people. So you really need to pick your audience of who you share this with. I reached out for help. I had hit rock bottom and when I woke up in the morning, I’d rather die than live. So I’m very fortunate that my higher power gave me the strength to wait for the help that I needed and that I’ve been able to have the best counselors, honestly, here in Dufferin County, that I’ve been able to guide me and show me a better way to live. I am currently working with other dog groomers to get my skill level up, as well as my confidence level up. So eventually I would like to start my own business because I have found a passion with working with animals. And I’m happy that it’s not too late, that, you know, I’m still pretty young and I still have a lot of life left in me to be able to do something that I love every day and make something else happy and have that instant gratification. When you make a dog feel good about themselves and the owners happy when the dog leaves as well. I would like people to know that I’m here to share a message that people can change. I’m a fun loving, hard working individual who just wants to be given a second chance at life. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but I wouldn’t take them back for anything. It’s made me who I am today. It’s made me a very reliable, loving, caring person who just wants to do better. I remember when I first got clean, when I was twenty one, I couldn’t remember my birthday. I would have little things like brushing my teeth and it would feel weird. It definitely was a very long journey of trying to figure out who I am as a person, and the things that I want in my life. I feel when it comes to addiction, people around you look down on you very, very easily. They picture dirty people, dirty places, dirty things… And that is sometimes a story for someone but it’s not always. I think addiction is a lot more prevalent than people realise. I’ve had such things as employers threatening to terminate my position based on me openly being willing to talk about such things in my life with customers, coworkers, whatever it may be, just as something that is very casual to me. It’s a part of my story, but no one ever wants to hear that. The lack of family support that I received was very detrimental to my situation because I feel as if my family just wrote me off as something that couldn’t be fixed and I was just going to be this way and people gave up on me. Slowly, people around me started to disappear and tell me that there was just nothing that they could do. It’s very difficult for people to access addiction treatment. If you are not rich, there may be OHIP beds but there’s maybe one or two that open up every eight months to two years, depending on where you want to go. And that’s not enough. There are addicts struggling everywhere all the time. We have this bubble of what the addict should look like: of broke and on the street and has nothing. But then you want them to pay sixty thousand dollars to go to rehab? That doesn’t make any sense. If this is the stigma that we have created for addicts then why is there not more help? I’ve been dealing with addiction for 20 some years. Addiction had lots of problems in my life, especially with my family. The beginning stages of it, they held a lot of bias towards me and they looked down upon me as I’ve been able to be more open and honest with them and share about some of the things that have happened in my journey. They’ve turned to become more supportive. So I think a big piece of it is they just need to understand I’ve had overdoses before, so my neighbors have seen the ambulance coming to my house and then they look at you differently. You walk into the grocery store and you know, people are like: there’s that guy who overdosed there… When I was at rehab, I got an abscess on my spine due to the method of drug use when I was at the hospital. They looked upon you like you were just an addict. They didn’t realize the pain I was in. I had an intravenous antibiotic drip and I had to pump because the infection was so bad. And when I went to the clinic to get the dressings redone, I’d say that the pump wasn’t working and I had to get flushed… “No, it should work…” “It should work fine for you…” And she was basically implying that I was using the pump and the intravenous line for using drugs again, which I wasn’t. And it made me feel that she was just looking down upon me. So I’m looking at writing a recovery poem book where other addicts can be able to relate, to be able to have some insight, some hope and some faith that their life could change and get better. So this is what I wrote: Been dazed and confused for so many years, drowning my sorrows in ice cold beers. Spent my time hiding from many of my fears. Sick and tired of avoiding the shedding of tears. If people just understood more, if people ask the questions that they’re afraid of the answers of, and really got an understanding of the disease and the life of the disease, they would understand it a little more and maybe have a little compassion for the addict and support them so they can have a successful recovery. My addiction is a consequence of my family. The darkest time was from 18 to 25 and pretty clean until my 40s, so often on very difficult relationship with drugs. For 20 years, I’ve been going back and forth to university. I’d go… go broke… go… go broke… and I finish my degree this year. I think I’m selfish around my studies because I think it’s something for me. It takes my mind away from all the rest of the clutter. It’s taught me how to learn and how to think, and I need to think in a better, healthier way. But I do encourage anybody who has addiction issues… Education is one of the ways out. I think the community stereotypes and stigmatized addiction without really stepping back and looking at their part in it in both the feeding of the addiction and the healing of the addiction, that it’s a very interdependent relationship with the addict. Society can feed it just as much as their life can feed it. If it puts shame, stigmatization and isolation, addiction will just flourish in that environment. It was more when I was working and I was an employee, the stigmatization was difficult. And also it was made clear to me that there are certain people in the organization not to let them know what my history was, just work to work. Sometimes if you’re an addict, you carry your own stigmatization that keeps you locked in the addiction. So my own stigmatization that I was good enough to be at the table, good enough to work, good enough, but I made it through another night. Stigmatization, I think, has limited my life experience. You have to understand, you’ve got to work with people from where they’re at. There’s no other way. And you have to work with that shame, because I really didn’t understand that I had the right to live. People had to teach me that. Just don’t let shame and stigma rule. Don’t give it that power. The most detrimental thing was losing my daughter. Maybe because of the stigma, maybe because when she went to ask for help, no one would help her. She got pregnant when she was 16 and had her son when she was 17. And during that time, she was so healthy, she didn’t smoke a cigarette… didn’t touch caffeine. She was really a great mama. The day before she overdosed, she phoned her family doctor and she said “I’m ready to go to that 90 day treatment, Doc’.” And, you know, he was thrilled to hear from her, “OK, we’ll set it up…” “We’ll get you to fill out the forms…” But it was too late. She died the next day. She had signed up to go into a rehab before, and when her turn came up, she wasn’t in the same mindset and she chose not to go. But that’s an addict’s mind, “No, I’ve got this…” “I think I can do it on my own.” And she couldn’t. So then she relapsed and started using again. When someone says, “Yes, I’m ready to go…” If they don’t have to wait, more people would be well. People who are addicted don’t want to be addicted. They think the addict is just a partier, is just wanting to get high and have fun. And that may have been the case the first or second time they got high. But once you’re addicted, it’s the last thing you want in your life. You want to be clean as a person. She was a loving mom, a great student. She wanted to be a nurse practitioner. She had so much potential. If it weren’t for the addiction, she would have went places. It’s hard being a single mom. That’s stigma enough right there. She wasn’t just an addict. She was a mom and a sister and a daughter. We need more awareness. We need more people coming forward with their stories of addiction overdose, because that’s the only way we’re going to get help for these people. I didn’t really have a good childhood. I’ve been through abandonment. So the only way I knew of coping with my pain would be doing drugs and drinking. Growing up in foster care… I didn’t really have support. It was either a worker that I saw every 120 days. I got to see a psychiatrist or a shrink every few months to talk about my past. And again, that support wasn’t really easy because when I left there, they just piped me up on Ritalin and Risperidone, because they didn’t know how to handle me. So when I was a kid, I was mostly a zombie till I got off the medication when I was like 12. Ended up stopped taking them because I knew that it was messing me up. And then in high school, I didn’t really understand what I was learning. I never really had a good teacher that actually pulled me aside to sit me down one on one and be like, “if you don’t understand something, let me know.” Never had that. The support really needs to be there. So the communication, that’s the number one thing. So how can the community can improve? I find that if they’re able to be more open and honest, having a discussion, maybe having more support in like a family gathering, right? That’s the factor, if you never really went through it or if you didn’t know, anybody that went through it, you’re really not going to know the pain and suffering. We are real people. We have feelings, we cry, we get upset. We get angry, too. The only thing we don’t like to do is ask for help, because we are afraid that, once we do, we’re gpomg to get the doors closed on us.