Addiction show a real-life drama
Episode follows the struggles of father and 22-year-old woman
Kent is an alcoholic in his 30s featured in a forthcoming episode of Intervention Canada’s second season. He’s a carpenter, a father, living with his second wife in rural Wetaskiwin, Alta.
Jessica is a 22-year-old heroin addict living with her mother in the Lower Mainland, also featured in an upcoming Intervention Canada episode.
The show documents their separate struggles, replete with violence, past abuse, and the anguish of their families — all of which makes for troubling viewing. As a new comer to the format, borrowed from a U.S. documentary series, I can’t help but feel like a voyeur as these stories unfold with slick editing and camera work, set to music that cues the emotions.
The show’s reality is as compelling as fiction and Slice says the show was a ratings hit in its first season.
Which is where the discomfort comes in: You find yourself watching the show as you would watch, say, the fictional CSI, turning this real-life stuff into drama, looking for villains, heroes, or motives.
Then you stop yourself — these are the raw, intimate lives of real people, not some hour of scripted drama.
“I haven’t spent any time in front of television cameras before,” says Victoria-based interventionist Sue Donaldson who joined Intervention Canada this year and participated in the intervention on Jessica.
“It’s funny, at one point the producer said something in passing about hundreds of thousands of people who are going to see the show, and I really hadn’t thought of it in those terms. Yeah, at first it was a bit of a thing to swallow.”
Donaldson says she had to consider before agreeing to take her work in front of the cameras.
But she knew of several addicts who were still in recovery after participating in the show’s first season.
“The ultimate message of the show is that recovery is possible, addiction is a treatable illness. We usually don’t see people who are moving among us and in recovery, in every element of society, clean and sober living effective and productive lives.”
Ultimately 22-year-old Jessica didn’t stay with treatment; she left a facility after a week last spring. Her episode shows Jessica joking and mugging for the camera as she goes to get heroin for a night out.
“But how tragic, that’s all I see,” says Donaldson. “That speaks to how addiction can create such delusional thinking, to be so blinded as to what’s going on. Ultimately, it can be a really rocky road. Sometimes it’s really a matter of planting seeds in the addicted individual.”
I tell her that I feel I have no business peering in on these people’s struggles.
“You know what, I get that about watching other people,” Donaldson says. “But a lot of families feel like that about their own family. That’s the thing, the whole stance — it’s none of my business. That’s private. When you get working with a family, there’s a lot of shame around it. But people could be helped.”
Families with addiction problems seek out Intervention Canada, and the series films their stories in return for an offer of residential rehab treatment for the addicted loved ones. The climax of each episode is the intervention, a meeting when families and friends ask the addict to take the offered treatment.
Vancouver interventionist Joey Marcelli, who participated in the Kent episode and one other for the 14-episode second season says he was aware of the U.S. show and the Canadian spinoff before he was asked to participate. “Working with clients oneon-one I finally got to a place where I thought how can I make more of a difference?”
Marcelli, an addiction counsellor and recovering alcoholic, says the show spreads the word to addicts, alcoholics and their families that interventions are a way out of their troubles.
The Kent episode ends with scenes of him looking much healthier after several months in treatment.
I wonder whether the show’s high
The ultimate message of the show is that recovery is possible, addiction is a treatable illness.
— Sue Donaldson
ratings demonstrate an audience beyond those looking for help; to include viewers perhaps sandwiching the show between their fictional favourites.
“It’s really hard for me to answer that because I am a recovering alcoholic who has literally been on skid row,” says Marcelli. “So I watch the show because at certain times, it can remind me of where I come from.
“You’re right, it’s not just the addicts watching it, although ask any addict who has had an intervention done on them, and they all say they love the show.”