FAMILY PROGRAM HELPS MOMS BEAT THEIR DRUG ADDICTION

D.C. Center Is Lauded For `Unparalleled' Success Rate

WASHINGTON - She wanted to say she was sorry. She wanted to say she loved
him. But Lorna Hogan, a crack addict for 16 years, said she instead asked
her son, Dante, ``Do you know why they took you away from me?''

``Because you use drugs,'' the 9-year-old boy told her. ``You need help.''

Six months before that day in June 2001, Hogan had been in jail for more
than 70 days because of outstanding warrants for assault, trespassing and
drug possession. She had failed two halfhearted attempts at kicking her
habit. Three of her children, Dante, Tiana and Trevon, had been taken away
by social services, which found her an unfit mother; the youngest, Anthony,
then a baby, had been taken by his father.

She was in housing for recovering drug-addicted mothers by the time she
asked Dante that question; it was his first visit, she recalled, and, when
he left, she said, she was ``lower than low.''

Family therapy

What finally saved Hogan -- a salvation that has kept her off drugs and
alcohol for two years, four months, and a day as of today -- is a treatment
program that treated not only her, but also her four children, now ages 2
to 11.

That effort, the Center for Mental Health's Family Health Program, located
in southeast Washington, was established in 1991 as a demonstration model.
It has gained national attention. The program, said Audrey Sutton, the
center's chief operating officer, serves about 60 mothers, who have about
four children each, and a few fathers, who recently began attending to
support their wives.

The University of Illinois, studying treatment outcomes in the few programs
that serve both parents and children, gave the Center for Mental Health a
73 percent success rate in 2000, Sutton said.

That percentage, in terms of substance abuse treatment in general, is
``unparalleled,'' said Malika Saada Saar, executive director of the Rebecca
Project for Human Rights, which champions the work of the center. Treatment
has historically targeted addicts, not recognizing the effects on the
family. That's the case in California, Texas and New York, among other
states, Saar said, ``and that's certainly the case here in the district.''
Except at the center.

Nothing about the center's brightly painted, well-furnished rooms hints at
the problems it treats. Scores of children, grouped by age, are supervised
and tutored by adults, fed meals and surrounded by a proliferation of
books. The focus, clearly, is on children; the mothers are in the program
for themselves and for their children.

``I wanted so much to get better. I wanted so much to get out of the
lifestyle I was leading,'' said Hogan, 41. ``I joined the program for
myself, but I did it for my kids, too. After what they've been through,
after dragging them around from place to place, they've needed stability.
They found that at the center.''

How it works

While mothers complete a four-phase program that lasts 16 to 18 months,
their children play and study together, and therapy groups serve those with
depression, hyperactivity and separation anxiety. When the mother and her
children arrive at the center, they go separate ways, touching base during
the day and at the end of the sessions. The mothers receive training, take
parenting classes and get substance abuse education and physical health
screenings. The center helps them find jobs when they graduate.

Hogan said she stopped working in 1992 -- she had been a circulation
assistant for the Hyattsville, Md., library and a typist for the Maryland
Department of Agriculture -- when Dante was born.

Work? ``I was too busy getting high,'' Hogan said of the reason she went on
welfare. Her grandmother, Clara, took care of her children. ``I was high
24/7, you know, and there were times I was too busy to even worry about
welfare money for my kids.''

These days, Hogan's children are her life. She got all of them back by June
2002, and since then, they've lived together, in a two-bedroom apartment at
the House of Ruth Reunified Families, a temporary home for mothers and
their children.

The people there referred her to the center, where she found her way out of
dependency, into her new job, and on to her hopes for a better life. That
begins, she said, with a part-time position where she can help other
mothers deal with a problem she knows best: addiction.