Just after 10 a.m. Friday, a group of more than 75 people walked from The Pines and Cady Hill Recovery Center down Main Street, all wearing bright blue shirts and holding handmade signs that promised hope of recovery after drug addiction.
Drivers in passing cars honked and waved, and several restaurant and retail employees at businesses along the route stepped outside to greet people in the crowd. One woman about to start work pulled her mother, a patient at Cady Hill, into a hug.
“Her daughter fought really hard to get her here,” said Meg Blaylock, marketing and assessment coordinator at the recovery center. “She had planned to be here for the walk and she got called into work, and so she stood out on the side of the road and was standing there and hugged her mom as she came through before she went into work. I just thought that was really special.”
It was the first Recovery Walk the Community Counseling Services-based recovery center has held. The idea behind it, Blaylock said, was to raise awareness locally not only of drug addiction and mental illness but of the type of supportive community that helps people heal.
The march took the group — made up primarily of patients at the treatment center, along with staff, counselors from other area treatment centers like Recovery House, and members of the community — from The Pines and Cady Hill parking lot to the Columbus Riverwalk, where the marchers set up games and lunch.
“(We’re here to) just kind of bring notice to the community that we as addicts, we’re people too,” said Payton, a patient at The Pines, who requested The Dispatch not publish his last name. “And to kind of give them insight into the change that a community like this can make — a recovery-oriented community can make — and how it brings people together.”
The scope of addiction
The Pines and Cady Hills Recovery Center houses more than 40 patients at a time who stay 30 to 90 days — and it stays full, said Blaylock.
Keenyn Wald, director of the treatment center’s drug and alcohol services, said the center treats between 350 and 400 people a year, including those in the center’s outpatient program. Addiction to drugs and alcohol is an extremely common problem, he said — everyone knows someone who suffers from addiction or mental illness.
The two aren’t mutually exclusive, Wald added, and said the treatments for addiction and mental illness — which at The Pines and Cady Hill include programs that help patients manage stress and other emotions and plenty of therapy — are similar.
He also said addiction is a disease — one that requires help once an addict decides they want to stop using drugs.
“The science is out there pretty strongly that once addiction is rolling, people need help in order for that ball to stop rolling,” Wald said. “There is a brain mechanism that kicks in beyond the scope of decision.”
When addicts use drugs, their brain releases dopamine, “the reward chemical” that tells people to keep doing something, Wald said. It’s the same chemical that keeps people eating and encourages them when they’re in a happy romantic relationship — and in fact, he even compared some addicts quitting drugs as similar to some people quitting a relationship.
That doesn’t mean decision doesn’t play a role, Wald added. Each of the patients decide to come to and stay in recovery, and a recovery-based community is essential in helping them stay.
“Whether it’s involvement with family, friends, healthy people, church, therapists, doctors, involvement in the community is the number one path to ending this,” Wald said. “We just can’t do it alone.”
Possible with community
Payton said he was addicted to drugs for years before he learned of the recovery community in Columbus, which was why he moved here from the Natchez area.
In the handful of years he’s spent in and out of treatment, he said he’s seen many people reach sobriety by working with the same patients, former patients and counselors present at the walk.
“If you look around, if this was a different environment where everybody was using, it wouldn’t be like this,” Payton added, looking around at the patients and counselors playing volleyball and eating lunch at the Riverwalk’s picnic tables. “People having this kind of fun and laughter and enjoying life. But because of this community of people that care, it’s possible.”
Wald said while he always wishes more people would attend the event, he thought the event was great for its first time.
“Addiction is such a lonely and isolated thing. In some ways, doing the Recovery Walk puts it out in the open,” Wald said. “You know, there’s a lot of people suffering from this that don’t know they can get help or that help is possible and doing an event like this just sort of puts us out there.”
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