Getting It, Together

She pauses.

“All I remember is waking up the next morning in the basement stairwell of a strange apartment with no underwear on and my bra in my hands.” Mary, usually quick to react, is stone faced. She grew up with two alcoholic, abusive parents, and at fifteen, pregnant with the first of her six children, she ran away from home and straight into a violent relationship, a pattern she repeated for years. After a while, she leans closer to Christiane and whispers, with barely contained fury, “No one had the right to violate you like that.”

When Mary started the fourteen-week program back in March, she couldn’t have offered such support to anyone, including herself. She was binge drinking — typically downing twenty-four bottles of beer in a sitting — and cutting herself. “It’s the anger,” she confessed to the group early on. “I can’t figure it out, but when something bothers me, when people walk all over me, that pain, I can only relieve it with a razor.”

Mary insists she’s angry, not mentally ill. “It’s situational. Why would I have a mental illness? I’ve been abused so much, sometimes I think love equals abuse.” She refused to accept the bipolar diagnosis psychiatrists gave her when she was first hospitalized in 1997 for severe depression and through seven subsequent admissions. “Whenever they give me my meds in hospital, I slip it under my tongue and then spit it out.” Seen through the lens of the traditional psychiatric treatment model, such “non-compliant” behaviour signals “lack of insight” and a poor prognosis.

However, by June Mary says she is managing her symptoms quite well. “Two weeks ago, I slipped really bad and got into the drink, but I’m a strong woman, and it was the first time in ages.” In addition to Pathways, she attends an addiction counselling group and a women’s support group. After months of weightlifting and elliptical training at her local community centre, she proudly displays her new muscles. When the recovery program ends, she plans to train as a volunteer on the Krasman Warm-Line, a non-crisis peer support service. The group “opened my eyes to things I could never see myself,” she told Christiane at the beginning of today’s meeting.

Now Mary prompts Christiane with questions to get her talking about what happened after she realized she’d been drugged, raped, and robbed. Matteo shakes his head as Christiane recounts that once the police arrived at her apartment and spotted several cases of empty beer bottles stacked up in her kitchen, “They just told me I should do my drinking at home from now on and left.” She keeps saying she’s fine, but Mary isn’t convinced. John listens intently, riveted by the exchange.