EX-ADDICT CHANGING LIVES
“THIS ISN’T a job this, it is a privilege. The most rewarding thing for me is when I see addicts come into this programme and their eyes are dead and after just a few weeks, their eyes start to come alive again.”
John Davis speaks from experience when he addresses the men taking part in the rehabilitation project known as The Growing Rooms based at St George’s Crypt homeless charity. The 53-year-old therapeutic drug and alcohol worker has come through his own hellish addiction problems to get to a place where he now helps others address theirs.
“I started taking drugs from a really young age. I went to prison a couple of times but just carried on,” he says. “I ended up getting married and having children but I wasn’t a father or a husband. The marriage went and my addiction progressed. I put my addiction before my kids and lost them for a number of years out of my life. I thought the only way out was to take my own life. I ended up in a psychiatric unit in 2009. One of the nurses in charge of my recovery was a recovering addict himself and got me a place on a programme that had really helped him.”
The same nurse told John he had helped another patient while on the unit – setting him on a new path in life once he started his journey out of recovery and back into society.
He originally went back to his previous job as a tiler but decided he wanted instead to help others. “I do this job to make a difference to someone’s life and give them that freedom from an active addiction, which is what I have got now,” he says. “What we have identified as success is not just to get people clean and living in a bedsit somewhere in Leeds but to make them a productive member of society.”
John came up with the idea of The Growing Rooms project, which involves residents living together for a year and sees them participate in therapy sessions along with participating in volunteer work.
The aim is not just to keep them free of drugs and alcohol but to equip them for life after recovery, helping them to build up work experience, write a CV and set up bank accounts in some cases so they have a better long-term chance of participating in society and not relapsing.
It is far from an easy process – a key element involves participants addressing their causes of their self-destructive behaviour and acknowledging how they have hurt loved ones along the way, while there is a strict policy which means anyone found to have relapsed and taken drugs or alcohol is immediately removed from the project.
After John came up with the idea for the project, he struggled to get funding to get it off the ground before being advised to contact St George’s Crypt, which has been helping the city’s homeless since the 1930s in Leeds city centre. In the wake of the Great Depression, the project was started in the crypt of St George’s Church by Vicar Percy Donald Robins. In the decades since, St George’s Crypt and its staff and volunteers have helped thousands of homeless and vulnerable people in a variety of different ways.
The continuing need for its services have been highlighted by recent figures published by the National Audit Office, which show the number of rough sleepers in Yorkshire and The Humber has increased by 139 per cent in the past seven years, going up from 72 to 172. There has also been a 69 per cent rise in the number of cases where local councils have stepped in to prevent someone becoming homeless – with 28,537 cases last year alone across the region.
Nationally, the figures are similarly bleak, with the numbers of rough sleepers in England now at over 4,000 –232 per cent higher than they were in 2009/10.
St George’s has been hosting the Growing Rooms scheme for a couple of years and currently has the capacity to deal with up to 20 people at a time, with spaces for eight people to live in two residential properties.
Currently, the scheme is only for men and there is a waiting list for residential beds – but The Growing Rooms scheme will move to new premises before the end of the year where it will also be able to help women and cope with increased demand.
For the men on the project, some have been there for months, others just weeks. But there is a common thread between them – a determination to conquer the addictions that have ruined their lives and destroyed relationships with loved ones for years.
Problems with heroin, crack cocaine and alcohol that started in childhood are common, and while not all of them have experienced homelessness, many explain how they had been at their lowest ebb, close to death and contemplating suicide, before coming through the doors.
Gareth says his addiction problems stretch back decades but he now feels he has a genuine opportunity for a fresh start in life. “Once you have started the programme, you get a purpose. You get a new beginning and it is up to you to grab that opportunity.”
Chris adds that for him, admitting the way in which his actions have affected others has been a difficult but vital part of the process. “Addiction affects everybody. It affects people I have sold drugs to, it affects my mum, my children, it affects society as a whole. This is a wonderful programme, it enables and equips you to deal with it all. It is scary thinking I have to face everybody that I have hurt but it is freeing as well.”
John, who started the programme just six weeks ago after addiction left him perilously close to death, says: “Ever since I started nothing but good things have happened. Everything has changed. This programme puts you back on an even keel. I’m loving my life now – I’m involved with my son, I have even spoken to my ex-wife.
“It has had a grip of me since I was 15, it has lost me an army career, it has lost me job after job. I had problems to start with but the drugs magnified my problems 100 times. Now I have got the tools to deal with this stuff. I just hope to be a normal, functioning part of society, hopefully I will have a job and everything life that. I’m never going back to where I was before.”
Now six months into the scheme, Simon started the project after two overdoses. He says while he had managed lengthy periods of sobriety in the past, this course has for the first time made him address the root causes of his problems.
“I had been clean for six years and then it got a grip of me. I got kicked out in February, I lost my partner and my children. I lived on the streets in Leeds city centre for maybe three weeks. What this is about for me is change, you have to change yourselves and your behaviours. I previously stayed free of drugs for six years but didn’t change anything about myself and it was more painful than using.
“The first thing you have to learn is to be honest with yourself. This programme allows us to do that.”