#i could write 70 posts about my families and i's medical traumas and issues

[mintymayo]

my life is so cringe rn. i had like 4 seizures after starting lamotrigine for bipolar. which is also an anti seizure medicine. and is just straight not supposed to do that. it should not cause seizures. but i would have them right before i was supposed to take the lamotrigine, and correlated with dose changes/timing. but it was working so well i felt so good!! i didn't want to stop

so i went to the neurologist and he was like "u probs have an underlying seizure disorder. try taking it around the clock instead of just in the morning" and so i do that. and i have 2 more seizures.

and so i go back recently and showed him a video of me having one hes just like "yeah thats a really bad seizure. definitely not to be taken lightly. i have never seen anyone react like this to an anti seizure medicine before. we already did multiple eegs and other stuff, u gotta go to the epilipilogist" (specific epilepsy doc idk how to spell it). so i guess thats where im going next. all the way in may.

ill just stay on keppra. the worst medicine ever that makes me more depressed than when i started and destroys my appetite. while weaning off the medicine that made me feel really great and motivated. in my first semester of college where im already struggling with an accelerated class that has a final in literally 2 days.

this is so cringe tbh.

side note: ambulatory eegs are SO ASS they put glue on your fucking head in ur hair and then don't even remove it all and im STILL finding tiny glue pieces in my hair. it's been like 2 weeks dude stop.

side note 2: there's so much medical shit i hate doctors. my mom got permanently ill, lost her job, our house (main breadwinner) and has energy, confusion and speaking problems after taking something that will not be named for legal reasons. NOBODY believed her ever so she has just slowly recovered some over time (enough to work again and stuff) but without any help from doctors.

i can't even get a fucking root canal done correctly.

which is obvs nothing compared to that but still. i specifically say "hey, my mom had really deep really complicated roots. please make sure to be really thorough." and they were like "sure"! anyway i didn't get a crown put on immediately because i had a gut feeling they fucked it up. guess who can still feel in that tooth. it doesn't hurt much but still. i even told the dentist and he was like "well theres no pain. we classify this as a successful root canal :)" like dude.

AND THEN I've had so much shit going on w the seizures that i haven't been to the dentist and now the tooth about the root canal one is getting a cavity probably bc the sharp edges of the root canal tooth is right below it piercing it. luckily it doesn't hurt (no idea why) but like oh my godd

[inevitably-johnlocked]

hi!! i recently got into johnlock and the universe has somehow directed me to your blog (which is an absolute godsend omfg). have you got any good possessive!john fics?

Hi Lovely!!!

AHHHH!! I’m so glad you enjoy my blog!!! <3 Thank you so much! <3

AHHH you know what??? I don’t get asked this all that much at all! I think mostly because it’s easier to find Possessive Sherlock fics and people then just... forget LOL

So guess what?? You’re the prompter for any fics I actually tagged or filed with Possessive John! <3 A pioneer you are! LOL I’m combining it with a few of the Obsessive fics as well, since I don’t have many new ones.

As usual, gang, feel free to add your own!! <3

POSSESSIVE / OBSESSIVE JOHN

See also: 

Specifically Jealous John b/c of Other People

Jealous John

Jealous John Pt. 2 and Jealous Sherlock Pt 2

Jealous John Pt 3 and Jealous Sherlock Pt 3

Jealous John and Sherlock Pt. 4

Jealous John and Sherlock Pt. 5

Hell or High water by bluefire301175 (E, 2,250 w., 1 Ch. || PWP, Frottage, Alley Sex, First Person POV John, Case-ish Fic, Mutual Pining, Bed Sharing) – John wants. Sherlock wants. Plain and simple.

Display by 221b_hound (E, 2,377 w., 1 Ch. || Post-HLV, Tattoos, Public Hand Jobs, Exhibitionism, Possessive Sex, Possessive Sherlock, Possessive John) – A new client has been flirting with Sherlock and, finding no joy there, with John. John seems annoyed to be second-best, Sherlock thinks, so Sherlock decides to give the departing woman (and maybe also John) a demonstration of who, exactly, John belongs to. But there's more than one level of sexual jealousy and more than one display of possession going on here, outlined in the window of 221b Baker Street. Part 2 of Lock and Key

Apodyopsis by QuinnAnderson (E, 3,347 w.,1 Ch. || PWP, Rough Sex, Table Sex, Anal, Sexual Tension) – Apodyopsis: (æpəʊdaɪˈɒpsɪs) noun. the act of mentally undressing someone. Part 2 of Undressed

Overture by Kate_Lear (M, 4,435 w., 1 Ch. || First Kiss / Time, Friends to Lovers, Angry John, Introspection, Dev. Rel., Embarrassed / Insecure Sherlock, Morning After, Bed Sharing, Cuddles / Limpet Sherlock) – A short snippet on how John and Sherlock might have got together.

Sherlock and John Go Clubbing by wendymarlowe (E, 4,716 w., 3 Ch. || Clubbing, Dirty Talk, Dancing, Coming Untouched, Coming in Pants, Bi John, For a Case, Friends to Lovers, Flirting, Sherlock is Lost for Words, Sexy John, Mutual Pining, Possessive John, Floor Sex/Hand Job/Frottage) – John pinched the bridge of his nose - even for Sherlock, this was a new level of no bloody boundaries. “You want me to go with you to a gay club, wait around twiddling my thumbs while I let you get pawed by a criminal, then out-flirt him and talk you into coming home with me instead?” Part 32 of John and Sherlock's Kinky First Times

Caves in the Mountains Are Seldom Unoccupied by starrysummernights & TheMadKatter13 (E, 7,925 w., 1 Ch. || Were-Creatures ||  Werebear John, Pseudo Bestiality, Rimming, Heavy Dub Con, Rough Sex, Come Inflation / Eating, Size Kink, PWP, Bratty Sherlock, Rutting) – “This isn’t something to play at, Sherlock,” he snapped. “If it doesn’t work out- what you’re asking of me- we can’t shrug and say 'oh well, at least we tried'. If we do this… I could seriously hurt you. Do you understand? I could lose control. I could… I could kill you.”

My Life for His by QuinnAnderson (E, 8,816 w., 1 Ch. || Guardian/Protector, Greek Mythology || Growing Up, Sex, Religious Themes, Suicide, Minor Character Death) – It began when Sherlock was eight, and he attempted to climb all the way up to the highest branch in the old willow tree in his back garden. He'd thought he was still small enough that it could support him, but the second he'd grabbed hold of it to pull himself up, the branch snapped, and down he went, plummeting a solid twenty metres. The odd thing was, he never actually hit the ground.

Of Course I Forgive You by allonsys_girl (E, 10,735 w., 1 Ch. || Love Confessions, Canon Divergence, First Time, Frottage, Wall Sex, Infidelity) – What if things had gone differently on that train car?

The Invocation of Saint Margaret by Ewebie (E, 15,831 w., 1 Ch. || POV John,  Crossing Timelines, Light Angst, Fluff, Series 3 John / Series 1 Sherlock, The Matchbox, Mushy Romance, First Time, Bisexual John, Pining John, Bottomlock, Love Confessions, Sensuality, Emotional Love Making, Snippets of Time) – When Sherlock Holmes opens the matchbox from The Sign of Three and John finds himself years in the past, back to that first dinner at Angelo's with a much younger Sherlock Holmes. Is he dreaming?

Out of the Woods by SilentAuror (E, 20,471 w., 1 Ch. || Post S4, Romance, Slow Burn, Flirting, Drunk Sex, Practical Jokes, POV Sherlock, Bottomlock, Possessive John, Pining Sherlock, Frustrated Wanking, Frottage, Hand Jobs, Blow Jobs, First Kiss/Time, Virgin Sherlock, Love Confessions, Soft Sherlock, Dancing, Bum Appreciation, Hanging out with the Yard) – Sherlock is fairly certain that John has taken to flirting with him of late, but can't be entirely certain of it. At least, not until a case takes them into a forest, along with Lestrade's team and something happens that will change everything about their lives...

The Kepler Problem by kinklock (E, 24,270 w., 1 Ch. || Sci-Fi AU, Alien Sherlock, Space Repairman John, Alien Biology, Horny John) – Working in uncharted space exploration was not as exciting as John had hoped, especially when it turned out to be mostly bot maintenance on uninhabited planets. However, the mystery of the repeated, unexplained malfunctions on planet BAK 2212 might turn out to be exactly the kind of adventure he'd been craving.

Inscrutable to the Last by DiscordantWords (M, 48,842 w., 6 Ch. || Post-TRF, Alternate S3, John’s Blog/S3 is a Story By John, Divorce, Marital Difficulties, John is a Mess, Emotional Reunion, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Grief / Mourning, Pining John, First Kiss, Adorably Clueless Sherlock, Nostalgia, Love Confessions, Eventual Happy Ending, Obsessive John) – He wasn't Sherlock, he couldn't work miracles. All he'd ever been able to do was write about them.

The Hollow Woman by ScopesMonkey (M, 51,335 w., 22 Ch. || Post-TRF, Major Character Death, Mystery, Romance, Friendship, Family, Angst, Crime, Reunion, First Kiss / Time, Nightmares, Doctor John, Jealous Sherlock, Jealous John, BAMF John, Angry John, Dub-Con, Rough Sex, Bottomlock, Possessive John, Villain Mary, Open Ending) – Forced to return to London sooner than expected, Sherlock falls into a case too close to home. Part 1 of the Hollowverse series

Points by lifeonmars (E, 53,791 w., 42 Ch. || PODFIC AVAILABLE || HLV Rewrite / Canon Divergence, Married Life, Pregnancy / Baby Watson, Drinking to Cope, Boxing / Fisticuffs, Clueless John, Angst, Minor Medical Drama, Tattoos, Christmas, First Kiss/Time, Eventual Happy Ending, Love Confessions, Doctor John, Sexuality Crisis, Slow Burn, Case Fic, Drugging, Blow/Hand Job, Emotional Love Making, Parenthood, Passage of Time, Obsessive John) – What if His Last Vow never happened? This fic picks up a few months after John and Mary's wedding, in an alternate universe where Magnussen doesn't exist, but Mary is still pregnant. Life continues -- just in a different direction. And slowly, Sherlock and John find their way to each other.

The Bells of King's College by SilentAuror (E, 64,019 w., 5 Ch. || Post-S4, Missed Opportunities, Angst with Happy Ending, Fake Relationship, Case Fic, John POV, Jealous John, John in Denial, Travelling / Holidays, Virgin Sherlock, Wedding Proposals) – It's only been two weeks since Eurus Holmes disrupted their lives when Mycroft sends John and Sherlock to Cambridge to pose as an engaged couple at a wedding show in the hopes of solving six unsolved deaths...

Gimme Shelter by SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John (E, 159,368 w., 21 Ch. || PODFIC AVAILABLE || 70′s Surfer AU || Period Typical Homophobia, Hawaii, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Professional Surfers, Gay John / Sherlock, Angst with Happy Ending, John was a Sailor, Misunderstandings) – All John Watson wants is the feeling of a freshly waxed surfboard under his feet and the hot California sun baking down onto his back. To finally go pro in the newly formed world of professional surfing and leave the dark memories of his past behind him as he rips across the face of a towering blue barrel. To lounge beside the beach bonfire every evening with an ice cold beer tucked into the cool sand beside him and listen to Pink Floyd and the Doors while the saltwater dries in his sun bleached hair. That's all he wants, that is, until the hot young phenom taking Oahu and the Hawaiian shores by storm steps up next to him in the sand in the second round of the 1976 International Surf Competition. (PUBLISHED AS ‘The Sea Ain’t Mine Alone’)

Proving A Point by elldotsee & J_Baillier (E, 186,270 w., 28 Ch. || Me Before You Fusion || Medical Realism, Insecure John, Depression, Romance, Angst, POV John, Sherlock Whump, Serious Illness, Doctor John, Injury Recovery, Assisted Suicide, Sherlock’s Violin, Awkward Sexual Situations, Alcoholism, Drugs, Idiots in Love, Slow Burn, Body Image, Friends to Lovers, Hurt / Comfort, Pain, Big Brother Mycroft, Intimacy, Anxiety, PTSD, Family Issues, Psychological Trauma, John Whump, Case Fics, Loneliness, Pain) – Invalided home from Afghanistan, running out of funds and convinced that his surgical career is over, John Watson accepts a mysterious job offer to provide care and companionship for a disabled person. Little does he know how much hangs in the balance of his performance as he settles into his new life at Musgrave Court.

Free Falling by twistedthicket1 (M, 203,574 w., 38 Ch. || Guardian Angels AU || Guardian Angel John, Fluff and Angst, Humour, Kidlock / Teenlock, Light Mystrade, Passage of Time, Possessive John, Drug Use / Overdose, Victor Trevor, Graphic Bullying, Big Brother Mycroft, Hard Drug Use, Depression, Possessive Sherlock, Possessive John, Panic Attacks, Nightmares/PTSD, Pining, Healing Abilities, Kidnapping, Violence, Torture, Blow Jobs, Virgin John, Emotional Development / Attachment, Mortality, Happy Ending) – All Guardian angels are born with a Chosen human. When this child is born, the angel comes into being to protect and care for them during their life on Earth. For John Watson, all he cares about in the world revolves around his Chosen, Sherlock Holmes. Watching him grow up though, the angel soon learns that God must have had a sense of humour the day he decided to make Sherlock, as trouble seems to follow him like a magnet wherever he goes. John can't decide what's worse, the idea of losing his Chosen one, or the fact that he may be breaking the most taboo law of heaven as he disguises himself as a human to better protect and befriend the beloved detective he's always watched from afar. He was meant to care for him. But what happens when caring evolves into something more? What happens when an emotion an angel is supposed to be incapable of possessing comes to life suddenly and viciously inside John's chest?

[akatsuki-celeste]

I can feel my anxiety medication wearing off so before I re-up it, because if ever there was a day that I just need to keep it going - I feel the need to scream into the void first. 

I haven’t talked about my personal life that much save for a few depressive, anxiety-fueled rants before, and maybe this is just one more of those but longer. But today was the last day in a long saga of days that has just made me....really question *everything*. It’s probably the closest I’ve ever felt to being absolutely done. 

So the last year and a half has been quite the roller coaster and occasional hell for me, as I imagine it has been for everyone else on the planet. Everyone has their own 2020 story to tell, everyone’s is important, so I haven’t made a huge deal out of mine. I’m luckier than most. So this isn’t a post where I’m going to go on and on about how rough I’ve had it, etc, etc. This is just going to be about...me. The facts, as seen by me. 

In March 2020, my work began efforts to roll out a remote work plan that I qualified to start early due to being immunocompromised thanks to a fun little auto-immune disease called ulcerative colitis. I’ve been diagnosed since I was 18, so basically half my life, and the medication I had been on then, Remicade, was one I’d been using for the last decade with absolutely no issues except maybe I get really tired and like naps afterwards. All of that went smooth. I felt relieved that I, at least, was going to be at home. One of my roommates, also a co-worker, was able to work out the same situation so we didn’t even need to deal with transportation for her until the official lockdown. 

And then a week - possibly less, my memory is hazy - my roommates (my then-best friend and her brother) got into a screaming fight of such epic proportions that I had an actual mental breakdown in the middle of (first for me). I remember hiding in my room with my laptop - I was still trying to work for some reason, I do remember eventually telling my boss I had a family emergency so I could log off - I remember calling my mother in a panic, and then I remember waking up at my parents’ house about 6 hours later and finding out that my mother had told my former roommates to gtfo, which I did not attempt to rescind (not at the time, because apparently I was there when it happened but I don’t remember this, and not later) because I knew living with them was no longer feasible for a number of reasons which I will not go into. I’m still dealing with five years of mental abuse and trauma on that one. 

By the first week of April they were gone, and I was able to busy myself for the next few months with making my place habitable for one person again, which was a good distraction. And then September came around and I started to notice these, well, patches on my skin. At first I thought it was just eczema or dry skin irritation, it happens sometimes. But with each month they got worse and worse, until December finally rolls around and the only conclusion anyone can come up with is that my trusty Remicade, which had successfully kept my UC in check for a decade, had finally decided to stop playing nice with my body and I was having a “psoriasis-like” reaction. So for the first time in a long while I was starting the medication shuffle again, steroid creams and a new UC medication that took nearly 4 months to get approved. I’m still not recovered even though I’ve been off of Remicade for 7 months now. It takes 6 months for that stuff to fully work its way out of a system, so the reactions didn’t stop until a few weeks ago and I’m still struggling to heal. I’d say it’s about 75% better than it was, but showers still suck, pants also suck, and I can’t tolerate temperatures higher than 70 degrees (hi summer, you suck). Also during this time I got the COVID vaccine (woo!) but seriously, if not for remote work I probably would have lost my job. I used up most of my sick leave in the beginning of the year because I couldn’t move without pain, even to sit at the computer for 8 hours. I also have a ton of PTO, but my boss told me that I couldn’t necessarily use it for sick leave (news flash for me) and again, could lose my job if I tried to use it too much. So trigger my anxiety. A lot. 

Fast forward. In one week my office is reopening for 50% capacity, which apparently means to upper management that we have to all work 3 days a week in office, 2 days remote, which doesn’t match the math but whatever. They’ve also stopped screening temperatures, have nixed the social distance requirement, and are only requiring masks for the unvaccinated - but aren’t requiring anyone to say whether they are or not. Needless to say, not exactly the best reassurance for my still-immunocompromised ass, not to mention the dress code will murder my skin. So I ask about continuing remote work and get told I need an ADA accommodation. Okay. I get the paperwork and pass it on to my GI; I was already on FMLA for my UC, figured this wouldn’t be that different. 

Except my GI has refused to sign the paperwork, saying there’s no medical reason for me to continue remote work. Despite still not being recovered from the skin reaction I got back in December from the Remicade, despite finding information that Remicade potentially interferes with the vaccine, I’ve been told to just adhere to social distancing and mask-wearing despite my employer not requiring that of anyone else. And with all the information about the delta variant coming out.... yeah, I’m scared. Probably paranoid, probably anxious. I have no idea how I’m going to get through a work day without having to medicate and I won’t be able to function if I have to do that. i see my psych before RTW-Day, but only a few days before. 

My last chance is that the dermatologist I’m seeing on Wednesday might be able to fill it out based on my condition, but at the moment I’m in a cycle of panic that I’m going to be told it’s Not That Bad and not get taken seriously. Which is a feeling I’ve been having a lot lately. I know it’s partly the depression and anxiety ramping itself up, but I just don’t know what to do now. All I want to do right now is press the restart button. Sell my place, relocate to a new place so radically different from where I am now that I can’t even compare it, start over. Get a puppy, write a novel, not be in $33k worth of debt. This wasn’t where I’d hoped to be at 36, and now it feels like it’s going to be another 5-6 years before I can get there. If I can get there. It seems like another lifetime. 

Anyway. That ends my void screaming. TLDR, I have to start working in the office again in a week, I’ve been told by my GI that my auto-immune disease doesn’t qualify me for an ADA accommodation to keep working from home, my anxiety is now living with me instead of me living with it, and my last shot is a dermatologist I’ve never met before. 

[tothedarkdarkseas]

just realised you've never been asked about this, but any autistic/adhd headcanons? your characters don't come across as nd (although i think you did a post once about stu's worst day and someone saying in front of him that he "doesn't have a real job" because he's 'special;' it actually spooked me how realistic and blood-curdling that was). but i know that you and elapsed-spiral are super close. since they have hcs, you might do too and wanna talk about it? idk. no pressure

Behind a cut because it got a bit long even though I said virtually nothing, and because the subject matter can be personal.

I was so certain that I had indeed answered something like this before that I went through my blog looking, but I could only find a somewhat-related answer about Stu's mental state following PB. You were right! Sorry I doubted you!

I appreciate you being understanding, as I will give a similarly dodgy wishy-washy answer and say that I prefer not putting too fine of a point on it. I do headcanon that both Stu and Murdoc are ND insomuch as both struggle with mental health, but for obvious reasons I don't think it's entirely appropriate for me to draw a line between things like Stuart's intelligence and particular disorders, you know? While that is clearly not the aim of most fans, if it's not handled sensitively you run the risk of making some poor implications-- and yet too much effort to be inoffensive can unfortunately end up sanding off any real perspective being given. I just don't feel it's really that important for me to speak on the subject of whether these old men who are not taking medication responsibly or seeking specific treatment (in my "version" of events) have any named disorder. And on the flipside, when it comes to the extremely soft approach to ND character writing I don't fault anyone for seeking comfort or projecting on the characters, I think that content absolutely has a home, but I don't personally resonate with anything that infantilizes Stuart and it would be disingenuous of me to offer that. (Let's chalk it up to my own not-super-NT stubbornness and fixation issues, if that helps?)

I genuinely do HC Stu as "a bit thick" independent of any diagnoses, but I don't think that rules out spectrum placement either. I do also HC Stu as having permanent reverberating effects from the car crashes, and although he is remiss to acknowledge this, some from as early as the childhood fall. It is a heavy thing-- heavy enough for a young speed-addled Murdoc to cackle at and wound him, but too heavy to talk about at all when they're old-- but in my writing Stuart has sustained head trauma that left him with minor brain damage, and that is something that affects his cognitive abilities, response times, and fine motor skills. This hasn't always been painted with the most thoughtful brush in the earlier decades of the fandom, so I understand why some have kneejerk responses against it; it is an uncomfortable thing to discuss and an uncomfortable thing to display, and it's never my intent to be tacky about it. I hope that you get what I'm aiming for, and I think that you do! I'm really grateful that you thought that bit hit home, as it's by far the thought that most makes me feel that nauseous gut-response empathy with younger Stuart. Whether it's being attributed to his fall or the later accidents, I think it was extremely difficult for him to adjust (and he never really has) to being labelled by well-to-do relatives and more ambitious/less tactful peers as "special." It was very pointedly included in his worst day scenario because I see it as something that does indeed curdle the blood, it sits in him like hot lead and having it brandished against him in such a humiliating scenario is hell for him.

Murdoc I can see as being born ND, and his development was additionally stunted in his formative years from a combination of his troubled family, the environment around his socioeconomic class in the 60's and 70's creating a major class divide between him and others, and the hostility encouraged and returned by peers and adults in the school system. Again, I'd be reluctant to make specific claims beyond saying I feel Murdoc is not neurotypical-- it is perhaps not fully unrelated, but it is more overt and easier to point out that Murdoc is unwell psychologically, and my focus for both characters tends to steer more toward that.

I'm sorry if this isn't a very satisfactory answer! Thank you for your patience!

(PS- whoever told you I was close with Danni is a liar! Read the Mark Means/Simon Says series on Amazon now-- It's definitely a subject that has come up before, and I think we have similar views; they do a far better job speaking their piece about this than I do though!)

[palegengarsiloved]

Utangatta

"You were the only one who knew all my stories. You are the only one who knew about mom."

I re-engaged with Maniac alone armed with distance. After Russian Doll I finally felt like I had the emotional vocabulary to understand what Maniac was going for. The first time I simply absorbed it, uncritically, amniotic, expecting a fairly mindless psychadelic experience with a big-name cast and a tiny-word script. Jonah Hill and Emma Stone are absolutely outstanding, as is the entire cast, but the direction and writing and set design are unexpectedly exacting and wonderful on a level that are comparable with Mad Men or Lost In Translation. I will discuss some thoughts I had about the characters and themes after my Russian Doll-percolated re-watch. *Spoilers below*

Owen, Jonah Hill's character, is dealing with mental health issues, including fixations and the inability to separate reality and hallucinations, and is completely and utterly alone, sexless, inert -- withdrawn into a shell for fear of interacting with a world he doesn't trust to be fully real, unable to talk to women or peers or family in any authentic way after a series (a whole life, really) of errors and blips. To help this, his dreams in the clinical trial revolve around being in interesting and fulfilling and complicated relationships with women (Olivia, the woman he frightened with his first blip/break, who is a representation by the supercomputer to entice him into playing the little roles and 'solving' (and eventually trapping, after the machine breaks) him, and Annie, Emma Stone's character, who is working through her own grief and loneliness). All his dream roles are reluctant stereotypically-masculine projections that he ultimately rejects in part or whole, revealing to himself that he can move away from the toxic masculinity of his father and brother and be a man in his own way. In his last dream he finally confronts and questions the presuppositions and shoddy mental frameworks he has clung to around Olivia, and realizes that she isn't the wound he thought she was; he was his own wound, his poisonous modes of thinking and his complete lack of self-worth were shells placed around the idea of Olivia to maintain his patterns and routines of justifying that he was unlovable.

Annie is dealing with awful family trauma, stuff that put her dad in a self-sustaining capsule, literally sealed from the outside world. She is dealing with her problems through self-medication, bitter toxicity towards everyone and everything around her including herself, and a defeatist attitude to the wage-slave dystopia she is crushed under day after day in every tiny petty interaction. In contrast, her dreams in the trial have her as strong people with big agency and agendas to match - spies, femme fatales, a drunk con artist elf, basically dangerous women who have been deeply wounded or wronged on some level but who persist nevertheless. Owen reveals to her that other human beings still care and are worth fighting for, that friends can still exist as friends and not pill dispensers or faces to yell into or people who will someday die or go away like everyone she has ever loved has. Annie's confrontation and reconciliation is, like Owen's, just as much about herself as it is about a figure from her past. She initially would rather die than be vulnerable to another person after her past trauma, but she realizes that she has been deliberately nursing this idea of her sister as an controlled effigy to burn over and over rather than risking the sometimes-searing warmth of human contact again. However, her journey is interestingly different from Owen's dream-breakthroughs and real-life avoidance: it isn't the shared dreams that truly bond her to Owen, but the impossible idea that Owen actually might be right with his paranoid fixations. The idea that Owen and her might actually be truly connected in some strange cosmic manner. This belief allows her to be vulnerable again in her near-suicidal hollowness, because it allows her to believe in salvation; that she and her sister and her family might all someday be reunited, sterile and plastic and neatly arranged, like the toy diarama that she so often returns to in dreams. The fact that Owen and Annie's physical and eventually metaphysical escape is ultimately achieved through about four different secret plots all running into each other at the same time does not necessarily disprove her.

I think the idea of a supercomputer-aided clinical trial is an interesting thought experiment excuse for a story, much like Russian Doll, which I also adore, in showing that people who are so unbelievably and totally alone and broken can be fixed by looking to one another, even in the face of overwhelming pain and vulnerability and loss, even in the face of a giant omniscient system that has been broken somewhere along the way into thinking that it must kill those it fixes (read: modern healthcare, consumerism-as-medication, capitalism, patriarchal values, toxic masculinity, etc etc). I think Maniac and Russian Doll are, in their own macabre and somber ways, hopepunk - stories of hope and post-post-apocalypse, a finding of a way, in a world that has already largely ended in a fascist-capitalist techno-dystopian eco-armageddon.

Who hasn't struggled with mental health and a full array of personal demons in response to comprehending this world as it is? But in some ways I believe this shape of a story, of individuals who meet under a totalitarian system and still find each other, over and over again, and fight and ultimately sacrifice for each other and themselves, is a blueprint for how to operate in the 21st century and beyond. I believe it is, like Beauvoir and Satre, or Deleuze and Guattari and Foucault, an impassioned advocacy for recognizing the soul in each other and ourselves - a very specific, individual plea that is of course at the same time universally applicable: it is how you choose to operate in the face of certain defeat, the modes of thought you allow to have power over you, the family and friends you choose to retain in a world that tries to always put you in separate capsule beds.

"For people who are supposed to love unconditionally, families sure have a lot of conditions."

Like Russian Doll, the show confidently reuses lines and material and themes, keeps pushing and probing away at them, reworking and reangling their vectors of attack. I like shows that feel truly thought-out and self-contained, variations on a theme, a text that knowingly references itself: not as irony but as an argument that all things - ourselves, included - are this dense and self-referential and synchronous, that tell us that we unwittingly internalize everything about this obscene world that surrounds us, everything that's ugly and wrong, but also funny and random and utterly mundane. It also works as an analysis of what the show is saying about parents and children: that we are in fact of course remixes and variations of them, but we are also our own people, trying to make sense of the world using all the strange broken tools that they gave us. They, like authority figures and suicidal supercomputers, shovel so much seemingly-innocuous input into us, never guessing that we might refashion their tips as spears.

Early on, Owen dreamt that he had a plan: he was going to run away together with Annie, that they were in a car and driving really fast and escaping some unnamed, totalizing entity. I couldn't help but tear up: I knew, deep down in my bones the weakness and vulnerability as he revealed his plan, the defeated mumble acknowledging that this could never happen, and I knew from Annie's big wet eyes looking on in complete empathy and understanding, that she was also searching, as much as she denied it, for a partner to escape with. This is why the final scene was real, not another dream-within-a-dream. They learned to take control and manifest their desires, and allow themselves to believe that there just might be a plan for the universe, not handed down by God or God-adjacent drugs or supercomputers but one that you could envision and execute yourself, that you can in some way, through existentialism and each other, perhaps find meaning in a desolate world.

"This is it! This is it."

[vsplusonline]

Elliot, an alcoholic, asked his parole officer for help. She sent him back to prison

New Post has been published on https://apzweb.com/elliot-an-alcoholic-asked-his-parole-officer-for-help-she-sent-him-back-to-prison/

Elliot, an alcoholic, asked his parole officer for help. She sent him back to prison

Elliot Hudson found the box on his first afternoon home from prison.

He’d gone up to his old bedroom in his parents’ Ottawa house to unpack some of the clothes his father tidied away while Elliot had been incarcerated. He pulled out the old crock-pot box with “recovery stuff” Sharpied on the side. Inside there were maybe six or seven leather-bound journals, dating back to 2012.

Elliot, a contemplative 37-year-old man with an occasionally destructive tendency to get trapped in his own mind, couldn’t resist flipping through. It was disheartening.

The dates scrawled in the corners changed but the story didn’t. He read one page: I’m back in recovery… I’m super committed… I’ve been to five AA meetings in the last five days… I’m really grateful to be sober. This is it.

Then he’d flip ahead two weeks or two months: I’ve relapsed again and I feel terrible about it… I’m so ashamed. I’m so broken… What’s wrong with me?

“I saw the progression of how this illness has just decimated my life,” Elliot says. Family, friends, work, financial stability, emotional stability —

“There’s not a single area of my life that (addiction) hasn’t touched.”

Elliot Hudson writes in a journal he found inside an old crock-pot box. The journal chronicles his struggles with addiction and relapse over the course of several years.

Jane Gerster/Global News

To be sober and fresh out of jail on that day, Oct. 24, 2019, doesn’t feel all that different from being sober and “super committed” to staying that way in 2012, 2013 or 2014. A little more humbling, sure, with a list of court-ordered restrictions meant to encourage sobriety vis-à-vis the threat of more jail. But if his brain, already well aware that alcohol was ruining his life, couldn’t keep him sober then, what’s to say it will succeed now, rubber-stamped rules or no?

At Alcoholics Anonymous meetings they tell you that alcohol is “cunning, baffling and powerful,” but that if you acknowledge that, and admit your wrongs and are willing to make amends and put your life in the hands of a higher power, you will recover.

It’s an enticing thought, almost like if you know enough about the disease you can protect yourself from it — appealing to a thinker like Elliot. And yet, as two doctors wrote in a March 1993 review of addiction in the Psychiatric Clinics of North America medical journal, “the potential for relapse… persists indefinitely.”

Elliot thumbs through his old journals.

I’m back in recovery… I’m super committed… I’ve relapsed again… What’s wrong with me?

“My first priority is staying sober,” he says. “If I don’t do that, I can’t do anything else.”

***

For many people, addiction rolls off the tongue a little too easily. It’s, oh, I’m addicted to these little scones at the bakery down the street, or this new show on Netflix that I can’t. Stop. Watching. But the reality is that you probably can stop. Or at least, you can stop watching long enough to go to work or to your dinner reservations or to walk your dog.

Many experts, including the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), rely on the four Cs to differentiate addiction as a catchall term for finding it hard to say no and an actual substance use disorder. The four Cs are: craving, loss of control of amount or frequency of use, compulsion to use and using despite the consequences. Elliot knows that last one well.

Often, addiction stories double as sobriety narratives. We like that story, says Dr. Raj Bhatla, the chief of staff and psychiatrist-in-chief at the Royal Ottawa Hospital, where Elliot has received help in the past, because it’s simple.

Elliot had his first drink at 13, showed up drunk repeatedly throughout high school and graduated to drugs in his mid-20s.

Provided

We don’t like to look at the way social factors and individual people’s thoughts and behaviours interconnect. We don’t like to think about how housing, finances and abuse can each help push someone down the path of addiction.

“Addiction is a complex condition, a complex interaction between human beings and their environments,” wrote Dr. Gabor Maté in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a book about addiction. It’s a book that makes Elliot feel seen.

“Addiction has biological, chemical, neurological, psychological, medical, emotional, social, political, economic, and spiritual underpinnings — and perhaps others I haven’t thought about,” Maté wrote.

“To get anywhere near a complete picture we must keep shaking the kaleidoscope to see what other patterns emerge.”

That’s a big ask. Bhatla explains we’ve simplified things as a society because it’s easier to form conclusions.

“We should be more sophisticated as a society and we should be less judgmental.”

***

The first time Elliot had a drink he was 13 years old and a friend had stolen a mickey of whisky from her dad’s basement.

He’d grown up with a mother who struggled with addiction. So while he knew the effects of someone’s addiction — how they could be selfish, inadvertently cruel with cravings or wreck your plans to go camping or to a movie with their hangover — he hadn’t really placed a mickey of whisky on the spectrum to a lifetime of struggle.

In the backyard, the two friends mixed whisky with Pepsi and drank until Elliot was giddy and a little bit dizzy.

Elliot lay back on the grass.

Wow, he thought, no wonder my mom likes this stuff. This is incredible. I want to feel like this all the time. For a moment, he was content. He looked at his friend and asked, “When can we do this again?”

He didn’t think twice about asking; he felt wonderful and he wanted to feel wonderful all the time. She gave him a funny look, like, why are you already thinking about next time? Why aren’t you just enjoying this moment?

“The problem with substance abuse is that it works,” Elliot says. “Up to that point I had been so full of fear and uncomfortable emotions and in that moment, they just disappeared.”

Clockwise from top left: Elliot as a baby with his mother, Elliot as a toddler with his younger sister and Elliot as a young boy.

Provided

Elliot started showing up tipsy, then drunk to high school events. He wrote an exam hammered. He ignored the lectures: alcohol is bad! Drugs are bad! Don’t you dare use!

It was an easy out from dealing with physical abuse in a home that revolved around addiction, and an incident where he was sexually abused as a teenager. Drunken Elliot appeared so frequently that the school reached out to his parents to intervene. They set up a meeting with an addiction counsellor.

The counsellor was the first person Elliot met who scratched at the surface of why he drank.

Elliot told him the truth: I drink because it makes me feel good and normal, I become a teenager who can actually connect with his friends instead of feeling anxious and isolated in my own brain.

It was as Maté wrote: “Drugs have the power to make the painful tolerable and the humdrum worth living for.

“Like patterns in a tapestry, recurring themes emerge in my interviews with addicts,” Maté wrote.

“The drug as emotional anaesthetic; as an antidote to a frightful feeling of emptiness; as a tonic against fatigue, boredom, alienation, and a sense of personal inadequacy; as stress reliever and social lubricant.”

Elliot went back to the counsellor half a dozen times. He didn’t stop drinking, but he did find himself devoting a little more headspace to why he was drinking.

***

Addiction is a brain-warping disease, but is it a crime?

The desire to see drug use treated as a health issue rather than a criminal one is behind the push for decriminalizing illicit drugs for personal use, an idea that’s come up repeatedly in recent years as a result of the opioid crisis, which claimed nearly 14,000 lives across Canada between January 2016 and June 2019.

In July 2018, Toronto’s board of health asked the federal government to decriminalize drugs and in April 2019, B.C.’s chief health officer asked the provincial government to do the same. So far, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has resisted, preferring to focus on other harm reduction efforts.

Canada has a huge mental health and addiction crisis in prison. Federally, 70 per cent of inmates used alcohol or drugs in problematic ways in the year leading up to their incarceration, per a fact sheet compiled by the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse. More than half of inmates serving time have a problem with alcohol, while nearly half have had problems with drugs.

Substance use and abuse is a prominent factor underlying criminal behaviour, and not just in obvious ways like impaired driving. Substance use plays a direct or indirect role for people serving time federally for assault (69 per cent), theft (66 per cent), murder (58 per cent) and break and enter and robbery (56 per cent), per the centre’s research.

And the people for whom addiction and mental health disproportionately leads to jail time are some of Canada’s most marginalized residents — Black people, Indigenous people, people who are grappling with the ongoing impacts of intergenerational trauma.

Last month, Canada’s prison ombudsman warned of the “Indigenization of Canada’s prison population” now that the proportion of people in federal prison who are Indigenous has reached more than 30 per cent, despite Indigenous people making up only five per cent of the country’s total population. Between 2005 and 2015, the number of Black people behind bars has grown by 69 per cent, so while they make up roughly three per cent of the Canadian population, they now represent more than eight per cent of the population behind bars.

Elliot, who is white, knows he has privilege. Sometimes it’s hard to acknowledge while shame spiralling after another relapse, but he fights to remind himself. An estimated six million Canadians will meet the criteria (those four Cs) for substance use disorder in their lifetime. Elliot wants to use his experience to help them.

Elliot with his mother and father circa 2009.

Provided

People don’t get the help they need when our society focuses on individual choice and responsibility, says Justin Piché, an associate criminology professor at the University of Ottawa and co-founder of the Criminalization and Punishment Education Project.

We wind up “setting aside our collective responsibilities to each other and to the people,” he says.

Economic, social, racial and gender inequality is well documented in Canada. And so, Piché says, “we live in a society where people experience a great deal of trauma quite frequently.

“We need to be making a gradual shift towards a more compassionate and caring society, while at the same time trying to address the harms that exist now,” he says.

“That’s not easy work, to work towards a just transition, but we need one.”

***

On Jan. 18, 2018, Elliot made a weapon out of a prison regulation deodorant canister and a sock and attacked a guard at the Central East Jail in Lindsay, Ont. He grabbed her by the shirt collar and threatened her.

He would later acknowledge he must have looked terrifying — big and burly, sporting a beard — and want to apologize. But in the moment he felt desperate. He’d been in prison a few months, still waiting to be sentenced and still using. He wasn’t getting the treatment he needed and he had just come out of isolation.

His mother had recently died.

“I was a mess,” Elliot says.

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services says it is its “firm belief that when someone is given the chance to address the personal and socioeconomic issues that drive their criminal activity, everyone benefits.”

She acknowledged that “crime, violence, mental health and addictions are complex issues that cannot be solved overnight or by the provincial government alone.”

Elliot Hudson is pictured in the family visiting room at St. Lawrence Valley Correctional and Treatment Centre on Sept. 24, 2019.

Brent Rose/Global News

Elliot worked in audio engineering throughout his 20s, where booze and drugs were normal and nobody batted an eye when he was drunk or high — or both.

Elliot felt functional until he wasn’t. At some point, he realized that once he started drinking, he couldn’t stop.

Then he missed his best friend’s wedding. It was time to get sober.

With a clear head — and liver — Elliot’s world opened up.

He wanted to help open up other people’s worlds, too. He got a diploma in addiction counselling and spent a few years as a peer support worker. In 2015, he was accepted into the social work program at Carleton University. He wanted his thesis to be about the criminalization of addiction.

READ MORE: Ramadan behind bars — How one inmate’s fight to fast highlights oversight concerns

The war on drugs, which was initiated more than four decades ago, “has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world,” wrote a panel of experts in the 2011 Global Commission on Drug Policy report.

It led to the mass incarceration of people with addictions and didn’t even curb drug use. In fact, United Nations estimates show that drug consumption has actually gone up. Opiate use jumped by more than 34 per cent from 1998 to 2008, when it was estimated that 17.35 million people were using. Similarly, cocaine use jumped by 27 per cent to 17 million and cannabis use jumped by 8.5 per cent to 160 million.

“End the criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but who do no harm to others,” recommended the Global Commission.

“One of the research topics I was interested in was the criminalization of addiction,” wrote Elliot Hudson in his first letter to Global News on Aug. 21, 2018. “How sadly ironic that I should end up incarcerated for an addiction-related crime.”

Global News

It’s a huge topic; one so big that Elliot’s thesis advisor dissuaded him from pursuing it. And so Elliot winnowed it to access to addiction treatment in Ontario.

Having a purpose didn’t make Elliot’s stressors disappear. After all, logic doesn’t stop emotion. When the anxiety and cravings are overwhelming, it’s easy to seek relief in one sip that becomes two drinks, then 10.

Elliot finished his first year of school in spring 2016. He relapsed in the fall and took a mental health leave. By October he was facing charges for drunkenly assaulting his parents. He was released on conditions to not drink or do drugs. He was arrested again six months later for drunkenly damaging two windows at an ex-girlfriend’s home and failing to comply with the court condition that he stay sober.

Elliot tried to go back to school in the fall, but he was still drinking and using. He was bouncing between shelters. All his money went to alcohol and drugs. He started to shoplift from the liquor store when he couldn’t scrounge up the cash.

“It’s hard to remember what it felt like to be that desperate,” Elliot says. “It’s almost like your brain’s been hijacked.”

By the fall of 2017, Elliot had dropped out of school and was driven only by how to get the next bottle, his next fix.

On Oct. 10, he robbed a store. On Oct. 14, he robbed a gas station. Both times he threatened the cashier, although he had no weapons. The Ottawa police spread his image far and wide after the gas station robbery. Elliot turned himself in.

“Obviously, alcohol has led you down this path at this point and it’s time to deal with it,” Justice C.S. Dorval said during his sentencing on Feb. 5, 2018. He added six months for attacking the prison guard.

READ MORE: The Liberals promise to expand drug treatment courts — but will this reduce harm?

“The mental health issues, you can always get assistance. The addiction, you need to want it, you know, want to deal with it and it’s difficult until you get to the point where you want to be sober every single day,” the judge said.

Dorval encouraged corrections to help Elliot.

Substance abuse cost Canada $38.4 billion, or roughly $1,000 per person regardless of age, in 2014, according to a report from the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction. About $14.6 billion was attributed to alcohol abuse alone.

But is jail the right place for treatment?

Most addiction experts say no.

As Ontario auditor general Bonnie Lysyk noted in her December 2019 report on Ontario prisons, they are not equipped to deal with the rising number of inmates who have mental health issues.

The report found frontline staff don’t have the training required to de-escalate situations that arise because of mental health. In a review of internal investigations done in response to prison incidents in Toronto and Thunder Bay, the auditor general found that 57 per cent of inmates who tried to harm themselves or others had a mental health alert on their file.

Per the auditor general’s report, enhanced training provided by CAMH is due to be rolled out across the province this year. A spokesperson for the ministry said the program officially launched in January and includes “more job-specific case studies and scenario-based learning, as well as an emphasis on communication and de-escalation skills.”

And yet, there’s a culture clash between health care and justice.

It’s inevitable, Dr. Raj Bhatla says. While both health-care providers and corrections staff value community safety, he says the health-care side is more focused on treatment — “it’s a different paradigm.”

READ MORE: How Trevor died — Why prison offers a ‘golden opportunity’ to help solve the opioid crisis

That means it can be harder to rehabilitate people in prison, says Dr. Lori Regenstreif, an assistant professor at McMaster University who also works with the rapid access to addiction medicine clinic at St. Joe’s Hospital and the Shelter Health Network.

In Ontario, the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services makes decisions about prison health care instead of the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. Corrections’ focus winds up being “what’s legal versus illegal on the inside,” Regenstreif says.

In other words, the ministry will be concerned about the safety risk of inmates sharing the drugs Regenstrief prescribes with one another. However, Regenstrief, who prescribes buprenorphine, an opioid medication like methadone that’s used to treat addiction, would rather them share. The drug isn’t very dangerous and won’t get a person high, she says, but it could help them a lot. A spokesperson for the ministry says policies and procedures are in place for delivering health care behind bars and that “decisions are between inmates and medical professionals.”

More than 250,000 people are sent to prisons in Canada every year, which means one in 250 people. It has serious impacts on their health. Researchers in Ontario followed provincial inmates, such as Elliot, for 12 years beginning in 2000 and published their results in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 2016.

Those inmates were four times more likely to die than the general population. Their deaths were largely due to preventable and treatable causes, including overdose, heart disease and suicide. Inmates also died younger — men’s life expectancy was 4.2 years shorter compared with the general population while women’s declined by 10.6 years.

For Elliot, already feeling desperate in jail, just hearing the judge say he would get help to treat his mental health and addiction was a positive step forward.

Some of the many letters Elliot Hudson exchanged with Global News reporter Jane Gerster while he was incarcerated.

Global News

Except, nothing happened. Elliot stayed in maximum security at the Lindsay jail. When he asked about treatment, he says he was brushed off and told to put in a form to request a meeting with a social worker. The social worker told him it might take months. A spokesperson for the ministry says it works with staff as well as health and social service agencies to make sure inmates get the supports they need.

There was a lot of drug use on his range that the guards ignored so long as there weren’t any fights, Elliot says. A spokesperson for the ministry says it takes the health and safety of staff and inmates “very seriously” and that staff are “trained to be vigilant” with respect to contraband.

Frustrated and overwhelmed, Elliot kept using. What was the point?

“There was already despondency on my part,” he says. “Can I do this? Can I have a good life? Is there any point?”

Using felt like the path of least resistance.

***

“I’m one of the fortunate ones from where I’m sitting,” Elliot said in the family visitation room at St. Lawrence Valley Correctional and Treatment Centre in December 2018.

He was transferred to the centre that summer and was finally receiving the treatment he’d envisioned during his sentencing. It was the first time in a long time he felt hope.

The St. Lawrence facility is solely for men, a special prison operated in conjunction with the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group for inmates with serious mental illness. It provides specialized treatment for a number of issues, including sex offending, trauma disorders and dysfunctional anger. Roughly 100 inmates receive treatment at a time and according to a ministry spokesperson, there are currently four inmates on a waitlist to get in.

Elliot was eloquent and cheerful. He also acknowledged his privilege, even behind bars. So many of the men he’d met in jail had been in and out of prison since they were teenagers. They had no easily employable skills, no stable housing and no further education. Many would have to return to neighbourhoods where there were strong ties to crime, trauma and what landed them behind bars in the first place.

Elliot often found himself reflecting on just how different his life would be if he’d been caught up in the justice system at a young age instead of planted in front of an addictions counsellor who probed into the why of his disorder.

“It helps me have empathy for the suffering that these guys are enduring because a lot of them haven’t had a chance,” he says.

It’s a tough trajectory to put numbers on, says Bhatla, because it’s multi-faceted and you can’t blame just one thing. Correctional treatment programs like St. Lawrence Valley are important, he says, but not the sole solution.

“We need to do a much better job in catching people earlier, prior to them ending up in the correctional system.”

Many people with addiction and mental health issues have adverse childhood experiences, he says.

“We put them in a position where, from a psychosocial point of view, that’s the pathway.”

Growing up, some people experience emotional, physical or sexual abuse, emotional or physical neglect, domestic abuse, parental separation or divorce, mental illness at home, substance abuse at home, or an incarcerated household member.

READ MORE: Is poor health a problem you can fix by yourself? Not when you don’t have money

Each one increases the likelihood that a person will start using illicit drugs at a young age and use for life between two- and four-fold, according to a 2003 study published in the Pediatrics medical journal looking at more than 8,600 illicit drugs users. Of those surveyed, more than 30 per cent grew up in homes where someone abused substances, like Elliot did, and 25 per cent grew up in homes with mental illness.

“Children and adolescents, who are exposed to the types of childhood experiences that we examined, may have feelings of helplessness, chaos, and importance and may have problems self-regulating affective states,” according to the study.

“Thus, illicit drug use may serve as an avenue to escape or disassociate from the immediate emotional pain, anxiety, and anger that likely accompany such experiences.”

At the St. Lawrence Valley Correctional and Treatment Centre, Elliot was optimistic about the possibility of a parole hearing. He had plans to get out, stay with his father until he could lease his own apartment, and work in construction to make money to return to school.

“I feel incredibly fortunate.”

***

On March 7, 2019, Elliot’s dad drove to pick him up from the prison in Brockville. Right away, Elliot says it felt wrong, “like a fantasy movie that didn’t match up to what was happening in real life.”

He’d spent months planning his first meal free — a diner breakfast with real eggs and real sausages instead of the airplane-style pre-packaged meals he’d been fed in prison — but the restaurant he wanted to go to was closed. The backup restaurant was only so-so.

He was excited to sleep in a real bed with lights he could turn all the way off, but he couldn’t sleep. Every time he dozed off, he’d wake up disoriented by the dark and unsure of where he was.

“I got out thinking, ‘Oh, this is no big deal, this will be easy,’” Elliot says. “It turns out it was very, very difficult.”

Elliot’s anxiety was like a living, breathing entity he couldn’t dislodge from his back.

He’d gone from a regimented prison schedule to the freedom to wake up when he wanted and eat when he wanted and do whatever he wanted so long as he stayed stone-cold sober. And while Ontario prisons are required to assist in discharge planning, connecting people like Elliot to reintegration resources, Elliot says he didn’t get that when it came to parole. A ministry spokesperson did not respond to Elliot’s specific case, but said there are support options for inmates being released on parole.

“I felt like I had to make 1,000 decisions a day,” he wrote in a letter.

There was alcohol at the LCBO at the street corner, in the beer commercials during a hockey game, and in the vodka ad on the side of the bus station.

Alcohol was everywhere.

“FREEDOM!!!” The first email Elliot Hudson sent to Global News after being released on parole.

Global News

He made a to-do list, put his head down, and tried to will his anxiety to pass. As he crossed things off — bank, dentist — there were more to add on.

“I never felt like I was getting ahead so I started becoming very kind of manic about it,” Elliot says.

His dad told him to slow down but he didn’t listen.

Five days after being released on parole, Elliot went to get his hair cut. He sat there, silently battling his anxiety, while the barber trimmed his hair.

He talks about his anxiety as if it is another person inhabiting his brain, deceptively reminding him that there is one nearly instantaneous relief.

“Hey Elliot,” it tells him, “I know how to get rid of this anxiety. Why don’t we have a few drinks?”

Elliot took an Uber from the hairdresser to a bar at 11 a.m. and started to drink. The first sip tasted like relief.

“Many people have watched themselves helplessly as they began to do something they knew would be unhelpful or self-defeating,” Dr. Gabor Maté explains in his book.

“That’s the experience of brain lock: the clutch is stuck, so nothing can be done to stop the motor of ‘doing’ from engaging.”

Elliot drank until they cut him off around 3 p.m. Then, he went somewhere else — too drunk now for specifics — and drank through the night. It was a direct violation of his parole.

He woke up hungover and scared. He worried he wouldn’t be able to stop drinking again, so he called his parole officer to come clean. He thought she might be able to steer him towards a detox centre or some sort of community-based treatment.

She issued a Canada-wide warrant for his arrest.

“Her hands were tied as soon as she found out I was drinking,” Elliot says. “I fault the system.”

Addiction is a disease, says Bhatla: “It’s a relapsing illness.”

“Many parts of our society see (addiction) as a social weakness or an individual weakness and that’s not OK.”

***

The Criminalization and Punishment Education Project, which Piché co-founded, runs a jail accountability and information hotline. It’s for people incarcerated at the Ottawa Carleton Detention Centre and their loved ones to report human rights issues and try to get help staying out of jail.

Elliot’s story — a slip, a plea for help, and an uncompromising system — sounds an awful lot like those calls, Piché says.

Two extreme examples made waves this month after a justice of the peace in Nunavut blasted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for separately arresting two victims of domestic violence. The women had called the police for help with abuse, but wound up arrested because they had both been drinking contrary to sober bail conditions in place prior to the domestic violence for which they asked for help.

“It is troubling,” wrote justice of the peace Joseph Murdoch-Flowers of the RCMP’s decision.

“The police and the Crown must guard against what I would characterize as ‘institutional indifference.’ They must be sensitive to the big picture, and they must not allow legal papers to get in the way of decency and common sense.”

A ministry spokesperson says it’s modernizing health-care delivery for inmates and working to better identify those who have mental health needs.

“The ministry works to ensure those in its custody are treated fairly, respectfully and with the access to health care services that aligns with those in the community,” she says.

But the system is the problem, Piché says.

“We need a (criminal justice system) that actually makes common sense, that provides people care, not cages.”

Back in the Ottawa Carleton Detention Centre, Elliot felt demoralized. He pictured his life being married with kids and a career.

“I’m approaching 40 and I don’t really have much to show for myself.”

One of the guys on Elliot’s range offered to help with the depression. Elliot got him some money and spent his first week back in jail high on opiates.

***

At the end of March, Elliot wrote a letter to Global News from the Ottawa Carleton Detention Centre.

“I’m trying to figure out where I went wrong,” he wrote. “All I can say is that getting out was WAY more overwhelming than I could have anticipated. My anxiety was through the roof.”

Elliot intended to push for release again when he went before the parole board on April 2.

“I basically explained to them that my problem is not criminal behaviour, my problem is substances and I just need to figure out a way to stay away from substances,” Elliot said that afternoon. “I politely begged them for a second chance.”

They revoked his parole.

St. Lawrence Valley Correctional and Treatment Centre, the secure prison in Ontario for inmates with serious mental health issues where Elliot Hudson was incarcerated for the better part of a year.

Global News

“6 months, 180 days till Freedom version 2.0,” he wrote on April 25. He’d decided to recommit himself to recovery and had been sober again for a few weeks.

Elliot was back at St. Lawrence Valley Correctional and Treatment Centre.

As good as it felt to be sober and in daily treatment again, it also didn’t feel real. Elliot looked ahead to release, wondering how he could avoid the revolving door of prison and wishing he could focus instead on his health and sobriety.

“What the hospital thinks is best and what corrections thinks is best aren’t necessarily the same thing.”

***

Oct. 24, 2019 marked two-thirds of his sentence and so his release; another car ride back to Ottawa with his dad. Elliot does not want to go back to jail and he no longer believes he can outsmart his disease. It means he is living with opposing realities: that he must fight to stay sober while bracing for relapse.

The hardest part is the shame, he says.

“When you relapse there’s so much shame and guilt that just perpetuates more using and it creates a cycle that’s very, very difficult to get out of.”

On his last morning in prison, Elliot’s psychiatrist took a moment to remind him that relapse happens. Don’t drink and don’t use, he told him, but if you do, don’t make it a bigger deal than it has to be. You don’t have to throw your life away just because you have a slip.

To Elliot, that means don’t let the shame of having a beer or two turn into an all-night cocaine bender.

One big metal gate opens and shuts, then the second opens.

Is this real? He spent a moment in the car with his father, just thinking. Yeah, it’s real. Two years. I’m done. I’m free.

***

Less than a week after Elliot got out of jail, he sat at his father’s kitchen table in Kanata, an Ottawa suburb, wearing a button-down with more colours than you’d ever see on an inmate.

He was anxious but not forlorn. He sounded like a person who knew a lot about addiction, trauma and relapse and really, really wanted to stay sober.

“Today’s the fifth day,” Elliot said. “I feel much more calm.”

Elliot Hudson is pictured at his father’s Ottawa home in October 2019, just five days after being released from prison.

Jane Gerster/Global News

On the sixth, the Tuesday, Elliot went to a meeting with the John Howard Society to talk about finding him his own lease in Ottawa. It’s too easy to hide away in Kanata, he said, “I don’t want to isolate myself.”

He’d woken up anxious, lonely and full of fear.

Just after 4 p.m., Elliot sent a text about his day. The meeting went well, he wrote. He got bus tickets and $20 in Giant Tiger gift cards.

A pause. Another text: “I woke up today feeling terrified. I’m having a few drinks right now alone but I don’t want to talk about it on camera.”

Relapsing on probation rather than parole is superior in one way: there’s no condition not to drink. Sure, Elliot wants to be sober, but this time an alcohol slip doesn’t automatically mean a return to jail.

Still, November was hard and December was harder. Elliot drank and used drugs. He went to detox twice, although it made him panicky because it reminded him too much of being locked up.

“I need to learn how to live in the world sober and hiding away in a rehab for 28 days is not necessarily going to do that,” he says. “It sort of breaks the pattern of drinking or using, but it’s not teaching me how to integrate back into society.”

The tricky part was sticking to a routine, not hiding away.

He was looking forward to visiting a friend who’d stuck by him when he was incarcerated. She had two kids, a loyal Lab and an exuberant new puppy.

***

The kids wake up at 7:45 a.m. Breakfast, meds and teeth brushing takes until 8:30 a.m. and then they’re off to school. After school, they get two hours of video games and YouTube followed by one hour of homework and then another hour of games. Then, it’s meds, teeth brushing and lights out.

The routine is for Elliot’s friend’s two kids, who he moved in with just before Christmas. And yet, Elliot says, it’s really helped him cement his own routine. “Addicts are selfish,” Elliot says, but kids demand time and attention in a way that distracts from addiction and makes Elliot feel useful.

Add in the dogs — a Lab named Honey and a pug puppy named Lola — that demand pets and walks and love to wrestle, and his days are full with less time to overthink.

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Elliot is also sober. He marks one month on Jan. 17, 2020. It is a relief. He spent November and early December drinking and using. He went to detox twice. He buried his cousin from an overdose, a cruel reminder of addiction’s end game.

“I woke up clean and sober this morning. I have no intentions of using today, and hopefully I go to bed the same way,” he says. “Rinse and repeat.”

He’s seeing a psychiatrist now who’s made a huge difference. She told him to always come, but to let her know when he’s been drinking so she can adjust her therapy plan. That takes off some of the pressure and shame.

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Elliot’s also on new medications: clonidine for stress and naltrexone for his cravings. The last time he drank was the first time he took naltrexone. It’s supposed to trick the pleasure centre of your brain, he says, and — ever-curious — Elliot tested it out by having a few beers. He felt no relief, just bloat.

“It sounds kind of dramatic but it was a bit of a goodbye ceremony for me,” he says.

“Alcohol’s been hurting me for years. It’s destroyed every important relationship in my life and it’s time to say goodbye.”

Elliot slips later that month. He is admitted to the Royal Ottawa Hospital for inpatient treatment for substance use on Feb. 12.

***

The hospital program is good, “really good,” Elliot says after a few days, but he’s emotional. Right now, he’s listening to Blackbird by Shake Shake Go a lot: Imagine if it all goes wrong / One day I know it must come / But nothing’s gonna change my love for you, for you.

— with files from Abigail Bimman

Jane.Gerster@globalnews.ca

Follow @Jane_Gerster

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