From addiction to peer support. How those who recover show others a path forward in NC.
By Jane Winik Sartwell
Carolina Public Press
Thirty-three years ago, doctors prescribed opioids for Julie McAllister to help her recover from a partial hysterectomy. She spent the next 26 years of her life in an all-consuming addiction.
Her ex-husband and two adult children fell into addiction alongside her. Both of her children suffered multiple overdoses.
“All of a sudden, something you were only supposed to be on for two or three days, it turns into the rest of your life,” McAllister told Carolina Public Press. “Multiple people tried to help me. I always said no. I wasn’t ready. Even going to the suboxone clinic didn’t work for me. I tried.”
The cops came to their Burke County home 68 times in a single year — mostly as a result of McAllister’s many assault charges. Eventually, they charged her with being a nuisance to society and served her with an eviction paper.
Three weeks after that, before the police could hang a padlock on the door, the house burned to the ground. She and her family became homeless.
Those like McAllister, who have suffered from addiction and homelessness and later recovered, often have much wisdom and guidance for those who are ready, or almost ready, to take that same path.
A new kind of career opportunity, growing in popularity across the state, is the role of peer-support specialist: a person who has lived through the problems that services such as rehabs, hospitals, law enforcement agencies, correctional facilities, social services departments and crisis intervention services attempt to ameliorate.
Peer-support specialists work alongside professionals in these agencies to help them better understand the people they serve. They directly interface with the people suffering from these problems to get them the help they need, often working beyond the scope of what the agency can traditionally offer.
To receive certification, a peer-support specialist must be in recovery for at least one year, and complete a training program accredited by the University of North Carolina School of Social Work.
More than 5,200 certified peer-support specialists are working in North Carolina, and McAllister is one of nearly 60 certified peer-support specialists in McDowell County.
McAllister’s road to addiction recovery
“One night, sitting on the steps of a church that fed the homeless people in Morganton, I was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’” McAllister said.
“My husband had left me at the camp for three days, and I couldn’t even start a fire out there, the wood was so wet. I was like, ‘I’m tired of living this way. I knew there was a different life out there, because I had had it at one point in time. I just got off track somewhere.’”
A friend told McAllister about the homeless and addiction services for women in nearby McDowell County, and how they had helped her get her life back on track.
So, seven years ago, McAllister decided to leave town in search of a better life for her and her children.
“I thought, I’ll come up (to McDowell) and get us a place to live,” said McAllister. “Being in recovery wasn’t really in my thought process at that point.”
A faith-based nonprofit group helped her get a job at Coats American, a thread factory in Marion, the county seat of McDowell County.
“It wasn’t until I had been up here for a few months and realized, ‘This is starting to make some sense to me. I’m liking who I’m starting to become,’” she said.
“I realized that somebody’s gonna have to make a change, or my kids are going to continue to do the same things that they’re doing, and I don’t want them to die. And so I stayed here, and stuck it all the way through, and got sober.”
Both of McAllister’s children are now six years sober.
“When I got into recovery, I had a little tribe of people that came around me to help me make some decisions that I couldn’t make on my own,” McAllister said.
“I had failed at that many times — my past decisions had gotten me where I was at. I had to step outside of myself and be willing to listen to other people and take some of their guidance. I wanted to do the same thing for somebody else.”
During her recovery, McAllister heard about Impact Peer Support, which, five years ago, was a new organization using grant money to employ four individuals stationed in different agencies across McDowell County.
“When we wrote the grant, I was working at a homeless shelter,” Impact Peer Support program coordinator Jaqueline Fox told CPP. “I just started seeing some problems with our residents, some gaps in services. And we just knew peer support could bridge that gap.
“We knew the overdose rate was going up, and it was weighing heavily on our community. The foster-care budget was weighing heavily on our community as well. So that’s where we decided to embed peers — in agencies that are seeing the effects of substance use and mental health in Marion.”
Impact has a peer-support specialist embedded in McDowell’s emergency medical services, following up with overdose victims, another in social services, helping families at risk of having their children sent to foster care, one in homeless services to help people transition out of shelters, and a fourth in infectious disease services, helping get people into treatment for Hepatitis C and other diseases.
And as of January, they have added a fifth post, a peer support specialist embedded in the Marion police department: Julie McAllister.
McAllister’s job is to come along on calls, and talk with those people whose addiction or mental health issues may be the reason that someone decided to call 911. Her salary is paid for by the opioid settlement fund, which is the result of lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies charged with initiating the opioid crisis in America. They are specifically earmarked to fund solutions to the crisis.
“I still have a hard time believing that I’m actually sitting in the front seat (of a cop car) and not in the back seat and in handcuffs,” McAllister said.
“My very first hour there, they got a call of an active shooter going into the store. It wasn’t even the scene that really bothered me — because of my past experience with the police, it was the ride there. The lights and the siren, doing 100 miles an hour in and out of traffic. I went back into survival mode, into fight or flight. It took my mind back into my old life with the cops always at my house.”
Once at a scene, and the officer deems it safe for her to do so, McAllister can get out of the car and talk to the subjects of each emergency call, and then follow up with them over time to try to get them into the treatment they require.
“At two o’clock in the morning, when a police officer is dealing with somebody who is suffering from mental illness or substance abuse, they’re gonna say to the officer, ‘Well, you don’t know what I’m feeling. You don’t know what I’m going through,’” Marion police chief Allen Lawrence told CPP.
“And it’s hard to make progress that way. But Julie can say, ‘Yeah, I’ve been there. I’ve done that.’ And she might get them to listen.
“Historically, law enforcement agencies around the country have just been made up of just officers. We have always wanted to have other embedded services in our department, because law enforcement is kind of a catch-all: a lot of times when people don’t know what to do, they call the police. And so we ended up handling a lot of things that are not law enforcement-related. A lot of times you can’t arrest your way out of a problem.”
McAllister understands what it’s like to refuse treatment when you need it most, and to have your addiction result in visit after visit from the cops. She brings a much-needed patience to high-intensity situations.
“I’ve heard people say, ‘I don’t want to talk to you, I want to talk to Julie,’” Lawrence said.
McAllister has been able to get many people battling addiction into detox and treatment.
“I want to be able to help people navigate the resources we do have here,” McAllister said.
“It can be challenging: there’s a lot of barriers and roadblocks. It’s very hard to do it successfully without giving up and getting frustrated. A lot of times, they just think they’re not worthy enough. Sometimes they take the challenges too personally.
“It gets discouraging. It’s very easy to go back to your old patterns, to say, ‘This is too hard. It’s not worth it. I’m not worth it.’ Having a person to support them through the challenging parts of life can change their entire life. That’s what happened for me, and that’s why I do it.”
In addition to being a peer-support specialist, McAllister is also a community health worker, and recently passed her certification test to become a drug and alcohol counselor.
Co-responder programs in NC
Jeff Welty, a professor of public law at UNC Chapel Hill’s School of Government, told Carolina Public Press that the first co-responder program in the state started in 1972 in Chapel Hill, when the police department hired its first social worker.
The idea took off after the death of George Floyd in 2020, resulting in pressure on law enforcement agencies to think more deeply about how they operate. Chapel Hill’s police department now employs at least seven social workers, according to Welty.
While they often lack the scholarly background and professional experience that social workers have, peer-support specialists handle similar responsibilities within their agencies. Peer-support specialists are employed by 17 police departments statewide.
“Measuring the success of these programs goes something like this,” Welty said. “You have to ask: how many calls are co-responders going on? What are the outcomes of those calls? Are we seeing fewer arrests? Do we see more people connected with services?”
The success of a peer-support program for addiction can also be measured in terms of its financial impacts: fewer people in jail, in the foster care system, or in the hospital for behavioral problems or overdoses has the potential to bring some money back into a city’s budget.
Some impacts, however, cannot be represented numerically.
“Several chiefs have said to me that there’s almost a collateral benefit that they find really interesting: that by bringing people with a different training background and lens on the world into the organization, and allowing them to build trust with the officers, there is a value shift in the organization,” Welty said.
“These chiefs feel like that value shift shows up even on the calls that the co-responder doesn’t go on. The officers are changed by their experience seeing the co-responders interact with people, seeing the success they have, and understanding how they look at the problems that law enforcement is sometimes called upon to solve.”
The post From addiction to peer support. How those who recover show others a path forward in NC. appeared first on North Carolina Health News.
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