Mother’s plea for addicted daughter
Adistraught mother trying to get her drug-addicted daughter help has been told she should prepare for her to die.
Louise Litchfield wonders what rights she has left as a parent after spending the last five years seeking treatment for her 28-year-old daughter’s methamphetamine and codeine-based drug addiction.
Despite several hospital admissions and brushes with death, the Christchurch woman says authorities will not help her because her daughter does not want to help herself.
As she speaks, Litchfield does not know where her daughter is. She knows she has been spending nights on the street, and believes prostitution is paying for her addiction.
Her daughter’s addiction has swallowed up all Litchfield’s money, almost caused her to lose her job, and ‘‘torn my family apart’’.
She will not accept her mother’s help – in fact, she thinks her mother wants to kill her.
Melissa, not her real name, became addicted to codeine-based prescription drugs when she was 23.
‘‘Her first experience with methamphetamines was after the races one year, she was out with friends and ended up at someone’s place and tried it. It’s been a major issue ever since.
‘‘I didn’t know, but she ended up in hospital with kidney failure. She was really unwell.’’
In 2012, Melissa was placed on the police missing person’s list after she disappeared from Christchurch. She was found at a ‘‘cookhouse’’ on Banks Peninsula.
‘‘From then, it was just a major spiral down,’’ Litchfield said. ‘‘She was in and out of Hillmorton.’’
Litchfield sees glimpses of the Melissa she used to know.
When she is lucid she tells her mother she loves her, and considers the idea of going into rehab. But as soon as the withdrawals start, any inclination to seek help vanishes as quickly as it started.
‘‘I was told I need to prepare for my daughter to die . . . They obviously believe that there’s no help they can give her.
‘‘They believe that if she doesn’t die at her own hands, she will die at the hands of someone else.’’
Litchfield has been to court twice under section 9 of the Alcoholism and Drug Addiction Act, where a relative can apply to a District Court judge for an order requiring someone to be detained for treatment.
Both times, the judge has declined the request, as Melissa has successfully defended herself. Litchfield gave up a third time.
‘‘One judge told me I was trying to take away my daughter’s freedom and I was offending the Human Rights Act,’’ she said.
‘‘She’s allowed the freedom to spiral to her death, really.’’
John Dudston, of the Salvation Army’s Bridge Drug and Alcohol Centre, has been working with the family for two years.
He said there was no longer an effective way for relatives to get action through the court because in recent years ‘‘client rights have become paramount’’.
‘‘It used to be a much quicker process, maybe a couple of months . . . now we can spend a year [getting people treatment] and that is frustrating.’’
Litchfield and her ex-husband are incredulous at being told Melissa does not have enough psychological issues to be detained against her will.
‘‘The family came home one day to find her digging in the garden like a rabbit,’’ she said.
While sleeping at an airport in Auckland, Melissa was lured back to Christchurch with a plane ticket from her mum.
But she would not get on the plane because she thought Litchfield was planning to blow it up.
In October last year, Melissa assaulted Litchfield in her car. In the middle of a comedown, she punched her in the head ‘‘a few times’’.
Litchfield pressed charges and her daughter was convicted of assault.
‘‘She’s going to have to be treated against her will, but no-one will do it. I can’t take her because she’s on probation until July next year, but she’ll be dead by then.
‘‘They’ve told me anything less than 12 months in rehab and it won’t work. It may even take two or three times.’’
Litchfield is appalled at the way her daughter has ‘‘slipped through the system’’.
One of the conditions of her daughter’s probation was drug and alcohol counselling and screening – but as far as she knew this was not happening either.
Last she heard, from someone who had seen Melissa, she was ‘‘looking yellow’’, a sign of liver failure.
‘‘It’s hell. It’s absolute hell. She was a beautiful girl.
‘‘Why can’t she be given a chance? This is my beautiful daughter, she’s got her whole life ahead of her. I don’t want my daughter to come home in a body bag.
‘‘I’m trying to save her.’’