Relapse is part of homeless addicts’ experience

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/01/2010 (5424 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I’VE appreciated Gordon Sinclair’s chronicling of the story of Faron Hall, the hero of the res­cues on the Red River. His columns have edu­cated, informed and challenged many assump­tions about homeless people.

Sinclair’s recent description of Faron’s return to drinking ( Fame for hero no easy thing, Jan. 2), however, ended on a sad, fatalistic note: "Faron has gone back… to being the person he wants to be."

The finality and sense of failure I got from that just sat all wrong with me. Let me try to put another spin on it.

First of all, I don’t know Faron Hall well and my respect for his privacy would compel me to refuse to even acknowledge that I’ve met him, except that we had our picture in the paper together when he made a donation to the Main Street Project (MSP) just before Christmas. So there’s no secret there But please read my comments as observations about the whole homelessness and addiction ex­perience and not about Faron per se.

There are differing views about the best way to approach addictions and homelessness. At MSP, for example, we now believe that expecting people who have been homeless for a long time to stop drinking while still homeless almost never works. All the homeless people I have met here at MSP have tried for sobriety while still homeless many times, with each failure undermining their al­ready low sense of self-worth.

So we’ve shifted our focus to finding homeless people places to live, even if they are still drink­ing. Sometimes, achieving some stability and a feeling of accomplishment can be the first step to sobriety and recovery.

This approach is called Housing First and it has achieved success marks of around 80 per cent, ending homelessness wherever it’s been tried.

There are other points of view that say abstin­ence and sobriety are essential before there can be any hope of escaping life on the streets. Siloam Mission, for example, does not allow people into its shelter unless they’re sober. Alcoholics Anonym­ous (AA) adherents also promote a model of recov­ery based on total abstinence, and the thousands and thousands of AA success stories would sug­gest that it’s the right approach for a lot of people. So there are different views out there, but there’s one thing that we all agree on: Relapse is a part of recovery, and that’s true whether you approach homelessness and addiction from a Housing First philosophy or based on an "abstinence" model.

Every AA participant I’ve ever met has relapse stories to tell, and even in successful Housing First programs, it’s been found that participants try and fail to live on their own an average of three times before achieving success.

From this perspective, the story of a man who maintained sobriety for months once he got a place to live and supportive people around him could be testimony to the potential of all homeless people if they have the same opportunity, as opposed to just a sad swan song of another addict who’s failed because that’s where he "wants to be."

It’s all in how we choose to see it. Do we give up because of a setback, or celebrate the months of success and get ready to try again?

The final result in any individual case will de­pend on the choices that person makes, but a com­munity can help by continuing to encourage and celebrate successful steps, even if they’re baby ones. Sinclair has done us a great service by help­ing us to get to know this exceptional man named Faron Hall a bit, and I want to encourage readers who wish good things for people like Faron not to give up hope just because the path is sometimes a crooked one.

Brian Bechtel is the executive director of the Main Street Project.