https://www.wbaltv.com/article/recovery-to-relapse-one-womans-heartbreaking-struggle-to-overcome-addiction/25226711

Comments; Relapse is actually a diagnostic criterion for addiction!

 

Jayne Miller   

I-Team Reporter

BALTIMORE —

The long, hard, heartbreaking struggle to overcome opioid addiction can wind up back at the beginning.

WBAL-TV 11 News I-Team lead investigative reporter Jayne Miller barely recognized Phaedra Ward, meeting with her on a west Baltimore street a few weeks ago.

Eighteen months ago, Ward shared with the I-Team her attempt to overcome addiction. At that time, she had been drug-free for four months.

But the demon of addiction has returned.

“It’s messed up. (I was) doing good; just fell,” Ward said.

Relapse is an all too common feature of heroin addiction.

“That thing if I was having a bad day or if some (expletive) happened and I was feeling some kind of way, that easy, I could have been right back out,” said Sarah Blakely, who is in treatment in a program in Ward’s west Baltimore community.

The program operates up the street from where Blakely had been living and using.

“I lived in an abandoned house a block down from where I got my dope from, just so I would be closer to it,” Blakely said.

Ward, while in treatment last year, worked at a community center. Now, using again, she struggles to keep a small apartment.

“So what will the rest of the day look like?” Miller asked.

“Me trying to get $6 together,” Ward said.

“To go buy?” Miller asked.

“Yep,” Ward said.

Asked why she started using drugs again, Ward said, “Well, I got depression, so that has a lot to do with it, and the thing of it is there is no cure. People think you can be doing good one second, right? And that’s what I told you. You say, ‘What’s the plan?’ The plan is to stay clean for the next five minutes, if you can make it for the next five minutes. It’s hard.”

“If I don’t deal with what drove me to the drugs in the first place, I’m always going to revert back when those painful situations come up because that’s how I learned,” said Monica Scott, who runs an intensive outpatient therapy program at MISHA House.

Scott said recovery from addiction requires much more than detox, methadone and short-term therapy sessions.

“You can’t just keep putting a Band-Aid on a situation and sending people on their way. You have to support people continuously until they have been able to develop a support network for themselves that’s positive enough to support them, to check them on their bull crap, that’s positive enough to say, ‘You need to do X, Y and Z.’ (Or,) ‘No that’s not a good idea,'” Scott said.

“You know, people think, ‘Oh, I’m well.’ No, no such thing. (You’re) well and going to stay clean forever and ever and ever. It doesn’t work like that. It’s one second at a time. (That’s) all you’re guaranteed, if that,” Ward said.

The I-Team has already been contacted by people familiar with Ward, saying they want to offer their support.

In regard to drug treatment, state spending totaled $507 million in the past fiscal year, which was up 37 percent over the past three years.