Mr. Joe Slattery:

My perspective is to have a stand-alone service. To care for and support someone else’s recovery from addiction is a very different need. If you look at families impacted, you are talking about complex grief, trauma, abuse and all these things. It is great when a person goes into recovery. You are worrying when they are using and you are worrying when they are not. When they come out, you are tippy-toeing around and it is all about aiding the person’s recovery, which is really important. I am an addiction councillor by the way so I am not anti-drug users. From a family perspective, however, they are left with that trauma and PTSD of what happened when that person was in addiction, such as the fear of windows being smashed or the person coming in and doing something. That requires a stand-alone, unique intervention for them. Often, in communities in poverty, there is generational trauma where the parents bring that through and sometimes it ripples into the next person who ends up in addiction and so on and so forth. They need their own space to work through all that stuff. It should never be connected to anything else.