A child plays at Odyssey House drug rehabilitation centre in Campbelltown, Sydney. Source: News Limited
WHEN eight-year-old Sally* gets home from school she changes out of her clothes and heads downstairs to play in the well-equipped playground-sized backyard outside the family’s homely two-bedroom unit.
She might watch TV for a while or play with her two younger siblings before dinner, usually cooked by her dad and shared with the neighbours. She’ll draw a picture or two to be stuck on the crowded fridge beside more of her artwork and perhaps read the latest story she’s written to the younger kids.
“She loves reading, she reads everything,” her dad Mark, 36, says. “Books, letters, and the signs. There’s signs everywhere. You try and keep it away from them but they still pick it up.”
“Residential rehabilition”, “Therapeutic community”, “A calm in the sea of addiction” read signs dotted around the Western Sydney property where this and other families live, and when Sally reads them out it’s a reminder of exactly where they are. These kids are growing up in rehab.
IT’S THE BEST THING FOR US
“My mum thinks I live in a hospital full of junkies and that I’ve taken the kids to a jail — a jail full of junkies,” Mark says.
“She thinks the kids don’t need to be here, but as much as I didn’t want to come, I know now that I need to be here and that this is the best thing for me and for them as well.”
Mark moved in to Odyssey House residential rehabilitation facility in Eagle Vale after Sally, Tom*, 5, and Claire*, 1, were removed from his care in April last year. He’d broken the ice habit that had consumed him since his teens but had developed a strong dependence on alcohol and weed and was ordered to go to rehab — for the fourth time.
Even though he fought the admission order, Mark was eventually struck with the realisation he had to really turn his life around if he wanted to keep his kids. It was after he started his treatment at the facility’s detox unit and was informed of its Parents and Children’s Program he found a new motivation to.
Mark’s three youngest kids moved in to Odyssey House in September of last year after with the help of a staff member from the facility the department of Family and Community Services decided it was suitable for them to be there with their dad.
They entered the centre, one of only a handful in Australia that cater for patients with dependent children, subscribing to its goals of “breaking the generational cycle of drug misuse” and “nurturing family relationships to help children and parents to realise their full potential”.
“When I lost them it was a nightmare really, I didn’t know what to do,” Mark says from inside the shared living room of the unit he’s called home for 15 months now.
It’s spacious and light and clean and comfortable and doesn’t look like the sort of place you’d fight to stay out of.
“It took me a while to realise that I needed to be in here. It’s not wanting to lose them again and wanting to set a good example. Even though they’re sort of starting off here I don’t want them to end up in a place like this, and I feel like I owe it to my parents to be good now,” he says.
“I’m just over it. I want to set a good example for the kids and have a normal life. I’ve had enough of all the hecticness.”
A play room at Odyssey House. Source: Supplied
IT JUST TAKES OVER YOUR LIFE
Mark’s life turned hectic when he joined a gang at the age of 14. He started selling the drug ice at 16 and after a few months wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
That was back in 1996 when “ice wasn’t big”, he says, and while he says it was a different drug back then it was just as dangerous.
“Not many people really knew about it and everyone was only smoking it, no one was really injecting. It was a lot better, as in, more pure than what’s around now and it was cheaper too. You wouldn’t burn out so quickly,” he says.
“I was hooked and I kept going back but I mainly got myself into trouble selling. I’ve been stabbed a couple of times, robbed, I’ve been caught by the police and nearly ended up in jail and owed bikies thousands of dollars.”
But Mark didn’t mind the hectic lifestyle. He fit in and made good money. It took a few major roadblocks and years of crime and addiction for him to even think about breaking the cycle.
It was only ever when forced that the young dad entered rehab programs and never finished one. The first time was after he was arrested for kidnapping one of his mates and went to rehab to fight charges.
Each time he’d leave a program he’d stay clean for a while then relapse after a year or so and start selling again until he was caught by police and sent to another facility.
Although he tried to avoid it at all costs Mark now finally realises rehab is what he needed, and he realises the need for others more and more as the ice epidemic he says he was once an instigator of, spreads and destroys families in its path.
I DIDN’T JUMP IN AT THE SHALLOW END
It was ice that destroyed Sam’s life and set her on the path that led her to getting it back in order at Odyssey House where she resides her two children Grace*, 2, and Jack*, 1. The three of them live in a unit with a communal living room, kitchen and laundry shared with two other families. The house mirrors the one where Mark’s family lives about 50 metres away.
Sam says she’s taken the hard road to get here, but finally feels like she’s on the right track.
About seven years ago with two kids already in foster care, the young mum began using ice while working as a promotional model at the age of 20.
“I was getting lots of jobs, making good money and my goal was to try and get my children back but I went around it the wrong way,” she says.
“The girls (colleagues) were using it and I tried it. I didn’t jump in the shallow end of the pool either. It was great the first time but after that I needed more. Within two weeks I was injecting.”
Sam’s plan to make some money and prove she could be a good mother was torn apart when ice interrupted. She ended up homeless and endured five or six years of peak addiction.
Her only relationships were with drug dealers and other drug users, and an intensely violent relationship only increased her dependency.
“My mum got bashed and ran over and brutally beaten probably for the first 20 years of my life and I thought it was OK. It was just what I saw and she drilled it into our heads that you don’t say anything so that’s what I thought,” she says.
“I only got bashed a few times but when I did it was really bad. He was just horrible to me. He’d take my money, he’d kill my pets, he wasn’t a nice person … After I left him I stupidly went back and ended up in hospital after four days … Ice just blocks everything out and I didn’t have to think about losing my kids, about having no family, I didn’t have to think about anything.”
Swimming pool at Odyssey House, drug rehabilitation centre. Source: News Limited
I KNEW I HAD TO GET OUT
Sam managed to leave that relationship but kept using ice. She stayed clean during pregnancy with Grace but started using again shortly after her daughter was born and made the decision to seek help.
“I’d always fought against (FACS) and never wanted anything to do with them or my kids, but I never thought maybe they were trying to help me the whole time. It was the first time I was honest with them when I decided I needed help and I told them I just had to go to rehab.”
Sam has now been in the Parents and Children’s Program for 19 months. After referring her to the program the department ensured her daughter was well looked after before she was reinstalled to Sam’s care and the then one-year-old joined mum after three months.
It’s the 28-year-old’s first time in rehab and she’s determined for it to be her last.
“I came here because I wanted to opportunity to do this with my kids. It’s twice the length of the adult’s program but I don’t care. I’m working on two things while I’m here instead of having to go out raw, fresh out of addiction and then figuring out how to be a parent, here I’m doing both,” she says.
In a few months Sam will graduate to the final stage of her rehab program and work on re-entering society with her family. She’ll likely have lost most of her teeth by 30, healthy circulation is unlikely to return to her arms and those cysts on her kidneys won’t be going away any time soon. But she’s keen to find a house, a job and get the kids into school and be “a normal family”, putting ice behind her.
Exterior of the parents and children's cottages. Source: News Limited
KIDS IN REHAB, ARE YOU SURE?
Even the program’s co-ordinator Melissa Eldridge had her doubts about the idea of families living together in a drug rehabilitation facility before she started there nine years ago.
“Even myself, when I came for the job interview, you half expect to see people shuffling around in their pyjamas and slippers, comatose, but it’s completely the opposite,” she says.
“It’s a therapeutic community so we’re all part of the community. We’re all here to assist one another and to teach and learn.”
While parents and children’s facilities have their critics, Odyssey House’s program boasts a high success rate as well as a long waiting list, having to turn away several families a year.
Seventy per cent of the program’s residents are referrals from FACS. In a statement to news.com.au, the department said it recognised the links between the misuse of drugs and influence on child outcomes.
“For some families, accessing programs that provide holistic treatment that attends to their multiple needs can be most effective and often, produces the best outcomes for children,” a spokesman said.
“There is not a simple or single solution to parental substance abuse. However, families fare best when they are engaged in the process of treatment, feel a part of the treatment and have a commitment to the treatment. Parents who have limited social support and live socially isolated lives are at greater risk for poor parenting practices.”
Odyssey House, drug rehabilitation centre, Campbelltown, Sydney. Toys inside play room at parents and children's cottages. Source: News Limited
Senior researchers from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre says that the policy of allowing children under 12 to accompany their parents in residential treatment facilities has been accepted as world’s best practice for more than 20 years. It increases the likelihood of mother’s seeking treatment and reduces the dangers to children of being left in unsupervised high risk environments.
Having been through “a few different rehabs”, Mark feels he’s well placed to comment on the effectiveness of this style of treatment, where he’s learnt parenting and social skills as well as getting off drugs.
“You don’t really do anything (in other rehab programs), all you do is stay off drugs for the time that you’re in there. Here, it’s work,” he says.
The demand and waiting lists for programs like Odyssey’s are unlikely to go down with the ice scourge, the worst drug problem the nation has ever faced according to the Prime Minister, bleeding into family life across Australia.
Only recently assistant health minister Fiona Nash spoke of young mums using the drug just to get through the day.
Mark says he now feels bad for “all the people I’ve got onto it”.
“It’s much worse now though,” he says, grateful to have broken from its grip.
Main entrance Odyssey House. Source: News Limited
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