(this story was submitted via email by Edward Conn:wardconn@hotmail.com he wanted his name and email published)

Hi Debra,

I ve been watching the documentary My Son, Drugs and Me tonight with interest, although I seen your story in various papers over the last couple of years and have been aware of your struggle with your sons cannabis usage.

My reason for contacting you was to express my own frustrations of the professional establishment, most often in the form here of mental health practitioners, drug services or other agencies formed to support individuals and their sadly often chronic inabilites to offer effective support or interventions. This will include both the parents and the service users themselves.

I currently work in this field and have in the past been a heavy cannabis user myself. Unfortunately it is sad for me to report that I believe ignorance by professionals about the subtleties of the reasons young people use and what the experience of using is like often leads to an abismal lack of effectiveness in interventions. To me, I have seen for the last ten years that this is why parents and their children do not get what it is that they need to try and turn the ship around. I find this one of the most frustrating things to hear, however by contrast what I see is also the opposite. When effective, sensitive and consistent interventions are made available change happens. Often it is the lack of this which actualkly keeps the young person stuck also. My understanding of this is around the transitional phase of teenager to young adult. When the step from experimental teenager, the quest for self discovery and evolvement of the personality becomes fraught and caught up in the substance abuse. The transition to young adult therefore becomes stalled, the body may grow and the person get older, but the inter psyhcic shift to a responsible self orientating autonomous young adult is stalled.

This I believe is what you were refering to in the documentary about all these lost young people, which I whole heartedly believe you are spot on accurate with. The problem here is not just the cannabis, but also a fault of the system of provided care to offer, understand and know how to attend to this stalled growth. Not to blame parents in some form of psychoanalytical statement of ineffective parenting, nor to see that the child is also simply self indulgently abusing him/herself.

What I still find amazing and what enables me to persist in my work, is that I constantly see that once people get the knowledge they require, can have an adult percieve, understand and explain the individuals condition back to them, it suddenly begions the process of the light going on. This is the begining of the return back into the flow of life, via non judgemental adult interventions. So to me, in sumary what I am trying to say, a lack of robust accurate and direct information is at the heart of the failure of recovery or the failure of it even being able to start.

There are also emerging fields which I concur with that actually show some of the higher power type recovery models are outdated. Again this was a strong presenting factor for many of my private clients. Mostly these individuals were well educated, intelligent and able to judge well for themselves. A somewhat arcane or dogmatic model of recovery did not resonate with their own intuitive and felt needs. Colleagues in the field have also shared such concerns.

I would be more than happy in any way to help with your efforts and simply wanted to congratulate you on forcing the issue into the public domain, however I feel even at this level it only touches on the surface of what is a more complex, but also resolvable contempory social malaise brought about by a paucity of solid information and knowledge.

Kind Regards

Edward Conn

Dual Diagnosis and Complex Substance Abuse Therapist
Pg Dip Psychosynthesis Counselling
MBACP

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