Co-Occurring Disorders In The New York Times: After Drugs and The Dark Times, Antonio Lambert Helps Others to Stand Back Up

Below is a powerful excerpted article about co-occurring disorders that appeared at the end of December in the New York Times and is written by Benedict Carey. Focusing on how the co-occurring disorders of substance abuse and mental problems can ravage the life of a human being, leaving almost nothing but prison and a trail of damage behind. What’s incredible in the tale of Antonio Lambert is how he manages through faith, medication and companionship  to come back and create a positive and constructive life, learning the same “peer specialist” skills he teaches. Antonio Lambert’s story is an inspiration for us all in this holiday season.

At ONE80CENTER, our experienced staff and clinical team believe that co-occurring disorders do not have to be a life sentence of disaster, destruction and death. Instead, we believe wholeheartedly during this holiday season that the road of recovery is open to everyone who is willing and ready to make that change. Remember: You don’t have to do it alone! We can help lead you not only through detoxification and onto the path of initial sobriety, but down the long-term road that leads to true recovery and the freedom, happiness and serenity  you deserve.

There Is Hope — Antonio Lambert Climbed Out Of The Darkness Of Co-Occurring Disorders

The Dark Legacy Of Co-Occurring Disorders

SMYRNA, Del. — The taste of cocaine and the slow-motion sensation of breaking the law were all too familiar, but the thrill was long gone. Antonio Lambert was not a young hoodlum anymore but a family man with a career, and here he was last fall, high as any street user, sneaking into his workplace at 9 o’clock at night, looking for — what, exactly? He didn’t really know.

He left the building with a few cellphones (which he threw away) and a feeling that he was slipping, falling back down into a hole. He walked in the darkness, walked with no place to go, and then he began to do what he has taught others in similar circumstances to do: turn, face the problem, and stand back up. “I started talking to myself, out loud; that’s one of my coping strategies, and one reason I relapsed is I had forgotten to use those,” said Mr. Lambert, 41, a mental health educator who has a combined diagnosis — mood disorder with drug addiction — that is among the scariest in psychiatry. Mr. Lambert, a self-taught ex-convict who is becoming a prominent peer trainer, gives classes in Delaware and across the country. He is one of a small number of people who have chosen to describe publicly how difficult it is to manage such a severe dual diagnosis, including the sudden setbacks that often come with it.

Handling Co-Occurring Disorders Through Passion And Commitment

“He is an extreme example of how much difference passion and commitment can make, given where he’s come from,” said Steve Harrington, the chief executive of the National Association of Peer Specialists, a group devoted to promoting peer support in mental health care. Mr. Lambert, who has climbed out of a deep hole with the help of religious faith, medication and his own forms of self-expression, puts it this way: “There are a lot of people dealing with mental illness, drugs, abandonment, abuse, and they don’t think there’s a way out. I didn’t. I didn’t.”

Bean Bean in Spider City

His grandmother was the first person to call him Bean Bean, and the boy was so skinny that he couldn’t shake it. He couldn’t avoid the older toughs in the Brighton section of Portsmouth, Va., either, and he spent some of his school-age years taking beatings. That was Brighton back in the day, and at least those fights taught survival skills. Not everything did: He remembers being sexually abused at age 6, by an older boy in the neighborhood — brutally.

Later, he began to stand his ground on the street, earning a name as an up-and-coming gangster by age 12, a regular presence at Palmer’s Corner, home base for the heavies, the alpha males of Brighton — Spider City, as they called it. He was soon into drugs, first as a courier and then as local muscle, armed and very dangerous. He began using more and more cocaine, crack usually. The skinny boy grew big, strong and crazy enough that he would ride around on his bike with a sawed-off shotgun on the handlebars, pull up to a group of dealers and throw an empty bag on the ground in front of them, with these instructions: Fill it up. Now.

“I would shoot the gun off in the air to show I was serious, then just take the drugs and move on to the next pack of dealers, and lay them all down,” he said. He was a junior in high school. It couldn’t last, and it didn’t. He survived several gunfights, taking a bullet behind the ear in one (it is still lodged there), and in another being ambushed from behind and hit in the legs, arms and pelvis; those bullets were all removed without lasting damage, except for prominent scars. But the police were onto him now, and by 1991, at the age of 21, he was in prison, sentenced to 22 years for malicious wounding with a firearm and other charges, according to Portsmouth court records.

He was not a model prisoner at first. He incited a protest at one institution, after which guards confined him to a “segregation” cell, away from other prisoners, for nearly two years. He began to read in there, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, then Robert Ludlum, James Clavell, Sun Tzu, anything he could find. That curiosity nourished a deepening ambition that one day in 2002 turned to conviction. “This young thug I knew from the neighborhood comes in, first day of a life sentence, and he puts his hands up and says, ‘Hey, man, I’m here!’ — like he’s coming into a house party,” Mr. Lambert said. “That did it. I knew I had to get out and find a life, something. I didn’t know what, or how.”

Later, Antonio Lambert got a lifeline, is how, and it came just in time and from an unexpected source. Feeling lost, moody and desperate for his medication of choice, he was in trouble. The gunmetal taste of cocaine was irresistible, and at least it broke the fall. But his mood would return darker, and he would have to get high again. That is how it almost always goes with a dual diagnosis of addiction and a mood disorder, doctors say: Each problem inflames the other, in a cycle that is extremely difficult to break.

He found himself drifting toward the George Washington Highway, feeling in some ways more hopeless than he had behind bars — when his cellphone buzzed. It was his mother now living in California, and she had just seen something on late-night television: an advertisement for Teen Challenge USA, a Christian-based recovery program.

She gave him a phone number. He wrote it down, sat on the stoop of a boarded-up house and thought about it for a long time, and then dialed. The man on the other end listened and offered to waive the fee if the young man pledged himself to God. He completed the program, in Greensboro, N.C., and soon found a job. He was living clean, the family was intact and according to his medical records, a local therapist put him on lithium, a standard treatment for severe mood swings.

In 2007, he attended a training talk by Mr. Harrington, the chief executive and founder of the national peer association. “He was asking all these questions that reflected a lot of thought,” Dr. Harrington, now a postdoctoral fellow at Boston University, said in an interview. “When I heard more of his story, I told him, ‘Look, you can do what I do.’ ” They stayed in touch, and soon Mr. Harrington called to say he had scheduled Mr. Lambert to give a keynote speech at an event in Michigan. He boarded a plane in Greensboro, unsure of what he was getting into. “I didn’t even know what ‘keynote’ meant,” he said. “I thought I might have to sing.”

The story told itself, and people in the audience who feared for a loved one with similar problems wanted to hear more. Parents from all walks of life, doctors, clergy members and co-workers have pulled him aside to see if he could talk to a wayward son, or a daughter into drugs. He joined Dr. Harrington to form a company, Recover Resources, which sells peer support manuals, DVDs and other educational materials. A training session in June, hosted by the Delaware Psychiatric Center and run by Mr. Lambert, was life-changing for at least one attendee.

The Navy veteran had also struggled with substance abuse and a psychiatric diagnosis. “I knew from the first smoke break that this was someone important for me,” said the veteran, Justin Thompson, 28, who has since completed his peer certification under Mr. Lambert and now works as a peer specialist. The two have become close friends. “I just related to him right away, his passion, his story, the positive energy he brings — all of it.”

“You got to understand, for me, right now, what I been through, it’s sometimes hard to believe it’s all real,” Mr. Lambert said. “But I know my own mental illness and my addiction are real; I feel like they’re out there right now, doing push-ups, getting ready to take me down again. That’s why I got to have my own system for staying strong.”

When Mr. Lambert feels his mind capsizing fast, he feels he needs a peer himself, someone with a history who knows what it looks like — from the inside — to be struggling mentally, deep in trouble, and feeling dead out of options. Someone who can be an advocate, a companion, who can share his or her own story: who can simply be there, if that’s what it takes.

On a recent Saturday morning, Mr. Lambert was home alone, watching college football, when he felt a pulse of that same darkness and exhaustion that led to his last relapse. “I call it the monster,” he said. “I was lying there on the couch, and after a while, the college football was watching me.” He called Mr. Thompson, who hurried over with a pair of fishing poles. The two of them fished that afternoon. They fished and had a smoke and talked about nothing much, and neither could say exactly when it happened but it did. The monster was gone.

And the monster can be gone for you as well. ONE80CENTER understands that the road to long-term recovery is difficult and filled with potential pitfalls and problems. As a result, we have created a long-term community and support system for our clients that continues after treatment and never truly ends. We know how tough it is to deal with co-occurring disorders, and we are there to help you find recovery.