Often, when people think about behavioral health, they focus on the tragedies associated with addiction and mental illness. It is important that we always remember that recovery is possible. Since 1989, September has been designated as National Recovery Month, a time to raise awareness about innovations in treatment, address stigma, celebrate the hard work of behavioral health professionals, and rejoice in the people who have entered recovery from mental health or substance use disorders. At Safe Harbor Recovery Center in Portsmouth, Virginia, we are proud to be part of the recovery community.
Fighting Stigma
Stigma is a form of discrimination. It is often the result of false information or a lack of understanding. For example, people with behavioral health conditions are often portrayed as immoral, dangerous, at fault for their own disorders, and incapable of recovery. One of the goals of Recovery Month is to educate people about behavioral health, so that they don’t believe false information about people with mental health or substance use disorders. When more people understand addiction and mental illness, it is easier for people who are struggling to get the help they need to recover.
Modeling Compassionate Vocabulary
People who aren’t knowledgeable about behavioral health often say really hurtful things about people who have mental health and substance use disorders. Recovery Month is an opportunity to teach them kinder, more accurate ways to discuss these conditions. For example:
- It’s unkind to call people addicts, junkies, abusers, alcoholics, or drunks. Instead, we say that they are a person with a substance use disorder or an alcohol use disorder.
- We don’t say someone’s drug test was failed or dirty. Instead, we say that the results were positive. This is more medically accurate and removes the connotation that people who struggle with addiction are dirty or failures. For the same reason, we don’t say someone’s test was clean. We say the results were negative, or the person is in recovery or abstinent.
- It’s hurtful to call people crazy, nuts, or schizo. Instead, we choose accurate terminology. If you’re talking about someone who has a mental illness, say that they are diagnosed with a mental health disorder. If you’re not talking about someone with a mental illness, find another way to describe their behavior that doesn’t use words that have been used to stigmatize people with mental health issues. If they are unreliable, unpredictable, or do intentionally hurtful things, talk about that instead.
- It’s not accurate to call substance use a habit. Doing so implies that it’s a choice people can easily change, rather than it being a serious behavioral health disorder.
Increasing Understanding
We still have a long way to go in helping people to understand that behavioral health isn’t caused more immorality or weakness. Recovery Month is a great time to remind people that behavioral health issues are often caused or made worse by:
- A person’s environment
- Being unhoused
- Differences in brain structure
- Traumatic experiences
- Being poor
- Not having adequate support
Finding Hope
One of the biggest themes of Recovery Month is Hope. People can and do recover from addiction and mental health disorders. Fifty million adults in the United States consider themselves to be in recovery, including 2/3 of people who have experienced mental health disorders and 70 percent of people who have experienced substance use issues. By shining a spotlight on people who are in recovery, we give people who are still struggling the opportunity to believe that they can also recover.
Another part of giving people hope is talking about new treatment options that are being developed. For people who have tried to enter recovery previously and then relapsed, it may help to know that there are additional things they can try to find long-term recovery.
Preventing Behavioral Health Disorders
When we raise awareness about mental illness and addiction, teach people about the signs, and give them the tools to get help, we automatically make it easier to prevent and address behavioral health concerns. Young people, in particular, need this information so that they can make informed choices about their own lives, either to get help quickly or to entirely avoid likely triggers for behavioral health disorders.
At Safe Harbor Recovery Center, we provide residential, partial hospitalization, and intensive outpatient care for people with substance use disorders and co-occurring mental health disorders. Using trauma-informed care, we build individualized treatment plans that use evidence-based interventions to promote recovery.