Road to recovery
After 14-month free fall, Dallas Desjardins says deeper look at alcohol addiction reveals underlying mental health issues
For as long as he can remember, Dallas Desjardins has had one response to dealing with problems.
“I always turned to alcohol to cope with changes or things that I didn’t see coming, instead of properly coping with them,” he says.
Today, things have changed.
“My thought processes are a lot different than they had been, ever, I believe,” the Summerside man says.
In a recent social media post, Desjardins laid bare his personal struggles with alcohol addiction and the struggle to getting to the root cause of his addiction – a mental health diagnosis of adjustment disorder.
He says 2019 is a year he’d never want to repeat.
“The major depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts and crippling panic attacks are something I would never wish on anyone. I am glad to be coming out of that and finally, for the first time, receiving help to address the real underlying issues of my mental health.
“A very real problem which can affect anyone,” he posted on Facebook.
In a subsequent interview with the Journal Pioneer, Desjardins, a former golf pro at Mill River and Summerside golf courses, says sharing his personal demons and addressing some false rumours have lifted a weight off his shoulders. “I’m more willing to be able to face what I have to face because of a year of irrational thinking and very, very poor decision making.”
He says his Facebook post was also meant to help bring awareness to what happens within the Island’s mental health and addiction systems. He says he's not critical of either of those services, individually, but adds there is room for the two services to work more closely together.
He says programming at the provincial treatment centre at Mount Hebert was great for him but adds he feels the mental health component, to help with other underlying issues, was lacking.
Alcohol, he says, was always identified as his major issue. But even after he quit drinking for extended periods in 2013 and 2015, nothing really improved.
“In February (2019), I was telling my addictions councillor, ‘I feel like I should be going into the mental health wing as well.’
“The fact was, they have such a huge caseload with people who are sort of very severe, that I was very low on the priority list, so, for me to get in was very difficult.”
The P.E.I. Mental Health and Addictions Master Program Vision, commissioned in 2018, acknowledges that, even though many clients struggle with a concomitant mental health diagnosis, there are no dedicated mental health beds in the 34-bed addictions facility.
GREAT STRIDES
Lorna Hutt, manager of Community Mental Health and Addictions West, says great strides are being made.
“Really the message that myself and our leadership team within Community Mental Health and Addictions West is sending to our staff is, ‘we don’t want our clients’ journey with mental health or addictions to be fragmented; where it is a stop/start experience through one department to the next; we want our clients and our staff to understand our services as one, and that they will get the most appropriate service based on their needs’.”
A recent change enables referrals for mental health and addiction issues to be made on the same referral form.
“That might sound like a simple change,” Hutt says, “but it means a lot in our world because it ensures that someone coming through those lines will be looked at from both of those lenses.”
Things not always what they seem
Desjardins says it may have looked to others as if he had everything going for him, but that was far from the case.
“I had really good jobs, I had the perks and benefits. I had a beautiful family, a wife and three kids, a dog, a beautiful neighbourhood and nice cars, but I was struggling for a long time and I hid it very well.”
Following an “unforeseen incident” that changed the course of his future, Desjardins describes the 14 months after September 2018 as a free fall, trying to make sense of what was happening.
He became estranged from his family. He lost his job.
“I fell back into a deep dark trap using the only coping method I ever knew, which was using alcohol,” he wrote in his Facebook post. He says it was a friend’s insistence that he needed to get help that started him on a road to recovery.
“I wouldn’t say I was totally rock bottom, but I was as close as you can get pretty much.
And I said, ‘OK, let’s go.’”
He spent a week at Prince County Hospital and then was admitted to the 21-day program at the Provincial Addictions Treatment Facility in Mount Herbert.
He completed the program on Dec. 20. It was during his hospitalization that he had meetings with a psychologist and was prescribed an antidepressant and anti-psychotic medications that he said have finally kicked in. Staff adminis tered the medication while he was in the program, and he has continued with medication and counselling since then.
“I do feel completely different to how I felt at any point in the past,” he says, adding he hasn’t fallen back to his regular coping method, alcohol use, since his friend’s intervention.
“I’m sick of being sick. That is what it comes down to.”
WHERE TO FROM HERE?
“I won’t pretend to be healthy. I know there is a lot of work
(to be done),” Desjardins says. “I will have to start rebuilding my life, finding meaningful employment and getting my feet back under me.”
He recently accepted a job, starting this spring, in Newfoundland.
Although still estranged from his family, Desjardins says his daughters are his greatest motivation. He wants to be able to say to them, “Yes, I struggled, a lot, but I worked through it, and if you are ever struggling there is a lot of help out there that you can get access to, and it is better to access it early than when it’s too late.”