A JOURNEY INTO SUBSTANCE ABUSE

A Maple Ridge addictions counsellor is challenging mainstream
perceptions of substance abuse and treatment therapy in his new book
about a novel approach to substance abuse therapy.

A Long Night's Journey Into Day, written by Geoff Thompson, a
clinical addictions counsellor at Maple Ridge Treatment Centre, is a
psychobiography of American Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning
playwright Eugene O'Neill, whose recovery from alcoholism is used as
a model for a new approach to addictions therapy promoted by Thompson.

O'Neill's struggle, exposed through his writings and interviews,
shows how addiction and recovery are not about a medical condition,
but about a person overcoming an existential crisis.

Thompson suggests mainstream perceptions of substance abuse
incorrectly assume addiction is simply a medical or moral defect,
rather than a part of the human condition, and proposes the use of an
existential psychological method to treatment which, he purports,
matches the manner in which O'Neill overcame his own struggle.

O'Neill, who died 53 years ago this week at 65, was only able to quit
drinking when he found a life worth living. His recovery, said
Thompson, depended not on refraining from drinking, but on resolving
his own spiritual crisis.

He said the perceived lack of a meaningful life, as in O'Neill's
case, fuels an addict's dependence on drugs or alcohol.

"They're struggling as any other person does. [Many] can't rely on
any kind of middle class respectability. They can't say, 'Well, at
least I'm a good father or have a job.' They don't have that luxury.
They have to face the cosmos naked, and there's no easy way around
facing loneliness and boredom. So they use the drug as part of a
coping mechanism to survive in that existence."

"[O'Neill] was as big an addict as we have at the Maple Ridge
treatment centre," said Thompson.

It was his approach to life that helped him recover, and Thompson
said he can help his patients in the same way.

He said that mainstream therapy -- which teaches harm reduction and
coping skills -- doesn't do enough to address the underlying cause of
addiction, which centre around feelings of displacement, disconnect
and a sense of having no purpose in life.

Recovery, he said, requires finding a resolution to the deeper
existential crisis that fuels drug use. This, he said, is the
existential-spiritual approach to understanding and treating addiction.

"The idea is actually thousands of years old, but it's recently
emerged as a new way of looking at addiction," said Thompson. "It's
on the cutting edge of psychology. There's no pathology involved.
We're dealing with individuals instead of making sweeping statements.
We don't pin it to a drug. The way it's phrased by neurologists is
that addiction is not in the drug, addiction is in the person.
There's something in the person that makes them vulnerable to that drug."

Thompson said the medical community often uses the same
existential-spiritual template when counselling geriatric patients
and patients in palliative care, but only recently is it being
applied to addictions.

The title of the book plays on that of an O'Neill play called Long
Day's Journey Into Night, an autobiographical account of living with
a drug-addicted mother and alcoholic father. Thompson switched the
words in the title to represent the struggle through the dark night
of addiction to emerge into the light of health.

Thompson has been a counsellor at MRTC, a residential addiction
centre for men, since 1999, and received his masters degree in
counselling psychology at Trinity Western.

He is in the process of contributing to another book focusing on the
application of this therapeutic process.

The first book, he said, lays the groundwork, and "deals with the
theoretical aspects of addiction, and now we're going to actually
write an application for it."

Thompson will co-author the follow-up book with his mentor, Dr. Paul
Wong, a clinician and researcher out of Ontario.