Addict’s mother: there is life after drugs

THERE is hope and there is help, says Susan.

After 14 years of watching her son Philip battle with drug addiction, Susan has received help and has hope.

“Philip is clean more than two years. It’s about the best time we’ve ever had. In that time it’s fabulous what he’s achieved.”

Susan Keegan said her son, 32, is doing a degree in psychology at Trinity College and is in his second year of study.

Susan, from Mulhuddart in Blanchardstown, west Dublin, said she and her husband Philip first became aware of their son’s drug use when he was about 16.

“It was the early 1990s and he was doing his Leaving Cert. It progressed from there and got worse.”

His main drug was heroin and he followed a cycle familiar to addicts and their families: “He was on and off, he’d be in treatment for a while, come home and then a few months later relapse and then the whole procedure again. That went on for about 14 years.”

She said heroin was replaced by methadone, which was at least as hard to give up.

“They are on it for so long, that they become so addicted to methadone and that’s the worst thing to come off.”

Susan said her theory was that addiction lasted for about 10 years, at which stage the user either decides to continue on or try to really kick the habit.

She said her son went into treatment and underwent therapy two years ago, and has been totally clean since, including methadone.

Susan said it’s the hardest thing for parents to witness addiction in their child. “It’s not what you hoped for them. I used to look at him and go, ‘How could he have gone like that when we gave him this, or done that’.

“He was my child, I loved him, but I didn’t like the person he had become, just a complete change of personality, no respect for you, nothing. They don’t know they’re doing it either.”

She remembered a different boy before drugs grabbed a hold. “He was very outgoing, football was his life. He had brains to burn, did all honours for his Leaving Cert, but drugs took a grip and knocked about 10 years and more out of his life. He’s only now beginning to see life.”

Susan was one of several hundred parents who last night attended an annual service in Dublin for all families affected by addiction and in memory of those who have died from drugs.

The service at Our Lady of Lourdes Church on Sean MacDermott Street has been co-ordinated for the past nine years by the Family Support Network.

Susan urged parents who didn’t know what to do to reach out to their local family support group: “You have to speak, you have to talk, even if it takes you a month, talk to someone.”

The Family Support Network can be contacted at 01-8365168. There are 80 affiliated groups across the country.