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Since moving back to Trumbull County nearly two years ago, I have come to see our community with new, fresh eyes. One of the most important realizations of the last two years has been this: addiction is a major struggle in our community, and this is heartbreaking for me.
Chances are, if you aren’t struggling with addiction, you know someone who is – a parent, a child, a sibling, a friend. If you don’t know someone who is currently walking through addiction, then you almost certainly know someone living in recovery. Friends, addiction is real; but the good news is that people can change, addicts can recover and families can heal.
This, of course, is often a slow, grueling, overwhelming process, but it’s a process that happens all the time. There is hope – and that’s the message The Trumbull County Opiate Task Force, a program of the Trumbull County Mental Health and Recovery Board and the Alliance for Substance Abuse Prevention (ASAP), is trying to broadcast in our community through an upcoming event called Hope for Recovery.
This event is free to the public, and will feature speakers sharing their personal experiences with addiction – some as family members of addicts, some as medical and mental health professionals working with those in addiction, and some as recovering addicts themselves. Let me give you a hint at what you’ll hear at this event: There really, really is hope for the person in your life struggling with addiction.
Our region suffers under a serious influenza of hopelessness – “a hope deferred makes the heart sick.” Our region’s hopelessness reveals itself in a variety of ways: poverty, racism, broken families, addiction, a struggling economy. Yet, these symptoms point to a deeper reality, that there is real and true hope that we’ve lost sight of and need to recover.
That’s why this event is vital to our community’s journey back to health: It removes the stigma of addiction and recovery and lets everyone know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: We need more reminders of hope and good in our community than reminders of hopelessness and bad. It’s easy to gravitate toward the latter, and even harder to celebrate the former.
This event is also important because it reminds us that addiction is far more complex than we like to think. Our culture has built a prejudicial attitude toward addiction, imagining addicts to come from a certain income bracket or ethnicity. The truth of the matter is that addiction can capture anyone. Events like Hope for Recovery remind us that addiction isn’t “their” problem, but “our” problem – and we should all be a part of the solution.
The Hope for Recovery from Addiction event will take place 6 to 8 p.m. Saturday, March 14 at the Trumbull Career and Technical Center in Champion. If you or someone you know has a loved one that is walking through addiction, do your best to be at this event and be reminded, be inspired, that there is hope for your loved one in addiction.
Write Kyle Tennant at columns@tribtoday.com.