A few years ago, Patricia Meier would have said that some of the best years of her life were in prison.
What: COMET (Co-Occurring Methamphetamine Expanded Treatment program) will graduate 26 recovering mentally ill drug addicts. Alumni will join graduates to share personal stories of recovery.
When: Noon to 2 p.m. Friday.
Where: Clark County Community Health, Rooms C210 A, B and C, 1601 E. Fourth Plain Blvd.
Cost: Free; open to the public.
There, she had a warm bed, a hot meal and a steady supply of medication for her bipolar disorder. But once she left, she’d fall back into her rough-and-tumble ways of using and dealing methamphetamine.
What: COMET (Co-Occurring Methamphetamine Expanded Treatment program) will graduate 26 recovering mentally ill drug addicts. Alumni will join graduates to share personal stories of recovery.
When: Noon to 2 p.m. Friday.
Where: Clark County Community Health, Rooms C210 A, B and C, 1601 E. Fourth Plain Blvd.
Cost: Free; open to the public.
That was until November 2007, when the Vancouver woman was living in a camper on a construction site with her boyfriend, getting high on a daily basis. That’s when something inside her snapped.
“I don’t want to live like this,” she remembers praying. “If it’s going to take prison again to get clean, then I’ll do it.”
Instead of prison, when Meier, 47, was arrested for the fourth time, a judge gave her the option of drug court, which later referred her to Clark County’s Co-Occurring Methamphetamine Expanded Treatment program.
Today, Meier feels blessed. She’s clean and will graduate from the COMET program on Friday with 25 other recovering addicts. She has no doubt where she’d be if she hadn’t gone through that year and a half of grueling treatment.
“I’d be doing time again,” she said. “And again and again.”
Holistic approach
The road to recovery is long and arduous. Some people don’t make it. Treatment specialists say a key to sobriety is tackling other major aspects of life — mental health, housing and employment — in addition to the drug itself.
That’s the focus of the county’s tax-supported COMET program, which serves 50 mentally ill drug addicts at a time, half of whom will take part in a graduation celebration on Friday. Those graduates include those enrolled in the less-intensive Co-Occurring Treatment.
Counselors take an intensive approach by not only having daily treatment groups, COMET employment specialist Dianna Candanoza said, but also visiting clients at their homes and making sure they’re going to doctor’s appointments, getting involved in community groups and taking their medication.
“We customize people’s treatment,” Candanoza said. “We cater to the individual.”
That approach is what Meier was missing in previous treatment programs, including drug programs offered in prison, where counselors focused on her addiction without treating her bipolar disorder.
The problem was that her illness always led her to drugs.
“I couldn’t see how to get there,” she said. “I wanted sobriety. But the gap was too great, and I didn’t know how to access it.”
Meier started using meth 11 years ago, at the same time her bipolar illness was escalating. Her life quickly began to spiral out of control: She lost her waitressing job and her three young sons when she went to prison. Her days were spent trying to ride the latest high out as long as it would last.
Today, she lives in an apartment with a roommate and volunteers at her church, the New Life Friends Church and the Lord’s Gym, every Saturday night, preparing food for the youth. She’s living on Social Security, but hopes to secure a job in the near future, though she doesn’t yet know in what field.
“Every night, I lay in bed and think about how blessed I am,” she said. “I don’t have to get high to cope.”
“I’m a little bit nervous to come out from under the COMET’s wing,” she added. “It’s a blank slate.”
Laura McVicker: 360-735-4516 or laura.mcvicker@columbian.com.
