Mental-health issues, substance abuse often go hand-in-hand

Chelsea Ferguson was 14 years old when she first began using drugs.

She started by taking Ecstasy with her friends, then tried other drugs until she eventually became hooked on the opioid painkiller heroin.

“I kind of switched around a lot,” she said.

Finally, Ferguson’s mother intervened in August 2015 and admitted her to Gibson Recovery Center’s inpatient rehabilitation program in Cape Girardeau. The young woman’s stint in rehab seemed to be a turning point in her life, and now she’s a freshman at Southeast Missouri State University majoring in social work.

To remain clean and sober, Ferguson still has regular outpatient visits at the center and attends group recovery meetings.

Another thing that’s helped in her recovery is getting her mental-health issues under control.

In addition to depression, Ferguson suffers from anxiety and attention-deficit disorder. Even though her decision to do drugs early on was more a social one, the substances she abused became a temporary escape from her physical and emotional symptoms.

“(The drugs) definitely helped,” she said, “at first.”

But the more Ferguson tried to alleviate her internal discomfort, the more enthralled she became by the illegal substances she used, and the worse they ultimately made her feel.

“It kind of kept spiraling worse and worse as time went on,” she said.

The work she’s done at the Gibson Center has set her on a much more positive path — one that could have been fatal otherwise.

Rick Strait, program manager for the Community Counseling Center’s Integrated Dual Disorder Treatment Program, said people who struggle with chronic mental-health issues also are about 70 percent more likely to have substance-abuse disorders.

“Sometimes it can be like the chicken and the egg — what came first?” he said.

Addiction is itself a mental illness, Strait said, because it causes a chemical change in the brain so profound, a person will crave whatever the abused substance is above anything else.

“It’s also progressive and chronic and if left untreated, could lead to death,” Strait said.

The illness doesn’t discriminate, either. During his 16 years in the field, Strait has seen people from a wide range of backgrounds who struggled with the co-occurring issues of mental illness and drug dependency.

They have ranged from police officers to CEOs, truck drivers and Catholic priests.

“I even saw a pilot one time,” Strait said.

Nationally, about 7.9 million adults had co-occurring disorders in 2014, according to a survey on drug use and health by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Among respondents, the highest rates were among people between the ages of 26 and 49.

Because addiction and mental illness are not mutually exclusive, it is vitally important to treat them simultaneously, he said.

“By treating them both at the same time, you increase (a person’s) chances of having a successful recovery,” he said.

Ashley Naeger, a substance-abuse counselor at the Gibson Center, also is a big believer in treating both issues at the same time.

“It has really, really good results,” she said.

If only one issue is addressed, the other can hinder the likelihood of a person getting better.

“They’re clean and sober, but they’re still depressed or still have anxiety. Their mental-health symptoms can lead them to a relapse,” she said.

Naeger’s primary responsibility is to focus on treating substance-abuse issues at the center once patients have graduated out of inpatient care.

“A lot of my clients will start in residential and transition to outpatient, and that is when I’ll become the counselor,” she said.

Teri Crain, a colleague of Naeger’s, is a recovering alcoholic who began drinking socially after her first marriage ended, but whose addiction deepened as an escape from “the disappointments that happen in life,” she said.

“I just didn’t handle them very well,” she added during a presentation Wednesday evening at Christ Episcopal Church in downtown Cape Girardeau.

Not only was she suffering from depression, but her addiction was so out of control, she said, “I had to completely change everything.”

That included disassociating herself from her three sisters, who remained active in their own addictions while Crain was attempting to recover.

“The turning point for me was I didn’t respect myself anymore, and I didn’t respect other people,” she said. “I couldn’t live like that anymore.”

Now she counsels women as part of the Gibson Center’s inpatient program. Her second husband, Jeff, is also a recovering alcoholic, so not only do the two give presentations whenever possible, but they help support each other when the going gets rough.

“Jeff is my rock. If it weren’t for him, I never would have gotten through school,” she said.

The couple married in 2006, and Teri Crain has earned two post-secondary degrees in that time.

Jeff Crain, who said he had his first drink when he was 12, was drinking in a bar by age 16. It wasn’t until he retired from his family’s manufacturing business after 30 years that his addiction, coupled with bipolar disorder and longtime self-esteem issues, drove him to drinking heavily once again.

“Why I started drinking again, I don’t know,” he told the congregation.

Although he seemed normal on the outside, “in my head, I was a disaster,” he said.

When he and his wife met, he already had been sober for six months. Now, he’s been in recovery for 12 years.

“It helps being married to Teri, because if I start acting bizarre on an idle Tuesday afternoon, Teri will ask me, ‘Did you take your medicine?’”

At one point, Crain said he thought if he quit drinking, the depression would get better, “but it didn’t, because it was chemical for me.

“At some point, I discovered that sobriety is not enough. That mental-health issue is still hanging out there.”

The most important thing to remember, Crain and others said, is not to let shame get in the way of seeking treatment.

“Addiction is not shameful,” he said, and having a mental-health issue isn’t, either.

“Because I have a mental-health issue doesn’t mean I’m a bad person. It doesn’t mean I’m unintelligent. A lot of people with bipolar disorder actually have above average intelligence.”

Co-occurring illnesses are much more common than many are willing to admit.

“Probably most people you know are in recovery,” he said, “and they hide it.”

ljones@semissourian.com

(573) 388-3652