Addiction Epidemic: Shedding Light, Supporting Individuals

Joseph B. Devlin: Hello and welcome. I'm your host, Joseph Devlin. And on today's show, we're going to read parts of chapter one of my book, a step out of darkness. So let's get at it. Remember that when you leave this earth, you can take with you nothing that you have received. Only what you have given a full heart, enriched by honest service, love, sacrifice and courage. St. Francis of Assisi. Day after day, night after night, I work with speak to or bump into at least one person suffering from addiction. witnessing their struggles breaks my heart. I see it in their faces. I hear it in the way they speak. And I could feel it in my bones. Not only do I see the person who is being tormented by addiction, I see the many sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, grandfathers and grandmothers, aunts and uncles, friends and co workers who are devastated, believing there is no way out. Having been around addiction for so many years, I know it is sometimes easy to overlook someone who is struggling with this disease. For all the people that I see, I know there are millions more go unnoticed. In the United States, every eight minutes a person dies from an overdose. Opioids are killing more people per year than those who are dying at the peak of the AIDS epidemic. study showed that in 2015, there were enough opioid prescriptions written in America to keep every single American intoxicated 24 hours a day, for three straight weeks view have not been directly impacted by the opioid crisis, you most certainly know of someone who has. We cannot address this epidemic. By ignoring or simply throwing money indiscriminately at it. We as a community need to help one another.

Throughout my 20 years in the treatment industry, I have accumulated significant resources and have learned to navigate the system of what we call treatment. I've seen too many families get taken advantage of in the system. I want to let people know there is a way out of this addiction terror. And this book will help you navigate the process. Most people do not think there is a way out. And I am here to tell you that I've seen and helped countless individuals and families recover from this hopeless state of mind and body. My hope is that this book will show you what seems to be a complicated process is simpler than you think. You will make hard decisions, but the overall process of entertaining treatment, and what to do after treatment is relatively simple. The hard part is going to be asking for and accepting help. I'm here to tell you that the help is here, stop there. I wrote this book, because I do have over 20 years of experience in the treatment industry. And when we read that statistic, that every eight minutes, a person dies of an overdose in this country. I mean, that was mind boggling to me when I heard it. And since I wrote this book, that number has now jumped to having an overdose death every five minutes in this country. So what I know is that everybody's affected by this. It's either ourself a family member, or neighbor or co worker. We know somebody who's been affected by this epidemic. And what I found over my years of being in the treatment industry was the fact that some of the things that I took as common knowledge most people weren't aware of, for example, I remember sharing with somebody who's a family friend, who was asking for just hey, what do we do here? And I found out that their loved one was coming home from treatment. And I was like, well, listen, celebrate the fact that they're coming home from treatment, give them a cake and have friends over and just be like, Hey, we're glad you're home. And I was told what a great impact that was when they did that, how that changed the dynamic of the family just by doing something as simple as that. And I thought to myself, well, how can I share that information with more people? Therein lies the book in their lives this podcast, I want to be able to reach as many people as I possibly can.

Another thing that strikes me is that so many people have been affected by this and the family members are devastated by this and they don't know what to do. And I think of the people that I've worked with in The treatment industry. I remember a family that I was working with, and talking with a mom on the phone, and she's just broken up. And she's crying. And she's like, we can't come to the session today, because my son, he jumped out of the car, once we hit a stop sign, and he's gone, and he's off. And, you know, at the time, you know, I was able to say, Hey, listen, you just still come in, I just don't want to talk to you. And the way things were set up at the time, you know, technically, she wasn't supposed to come in and, and meet with me, and we couldn't bill insurance, but I still wanted to talk with her. And her some simple coaching, I was able to give her some language to be able to speak with her son, so that he was able to reengage with treatment. And, you know, he came back in and we still welcomed him with open arms, you know, he was able to maintain some sobriety moving forward. So I said to myself, Okay, well, how can I even tell even more people about this, give them some more language to use and, and that's what I'm going to do here on this podcast. I know what it's like to be on both sides of this. Because I'm also going to share a little bit about my own recovery process. And I'm not going to shy away from anything, because we're going to need we're going to address on this podcast, the mental, the physical, and the spiritual changes, and conversations that we're going to need to have in order to help our loved ones grow and to make changes. And so I'm not going to shy away from my faith, or the behavioral changes I had to make, or the community that I got involved with. Because that community that they loved me before I could love myself. And many times, I didn't even realize what was going on. But I just know that I felt right being connected with them. Other things we're not going to shy away from is how we provide support for other people, yet keep them accountable at the same time. There is a way to do that. We're also going to discuss that. We don't have to do this alone. The addiction works in such a way that it wants to isolate the individual, the family, the community, anything it can affect itself into. But we're going to stop that any of the darkness that we expose to light will fall apart.

So as we continue to generate this conversation, we're gonna expose the addiction to the light. And we all make a difference in this addiction epidemic. So I thank you for being with me today. And until our next episode, remember, sobriety is a family affair.