Representatives of Addiction Recovery Care conducted a community forum Tuesday at CrossPoint Community Church to share information about services ARC provides for people with substance abuse disorders.
Mason County Judge-Executive Owen McNeill and Circuit Court Judge Stockton Wood helped to organize the event.
McNeill said he has been trying to persuade members of ARC to explore opportunities in Mason County for the last two years.
“(Maysville) Mayor Debra Cotterill (also present at the meeting) and I agree that any additional assets we can bring to our community to help fight this battle (with addiction) are beneficial. I think ARC, being the commonwealth’s largest and most respected substance abuse and addiction provider, it only makes sense to bring their expertise here to Mason County,” he said.
McNeill said anyone would be hard pressed to find a citizen in Mason County who has not personally, or through a family member, battled and faced the hardships that addiction presents.
“It impacts all aspects of life, workforce, health care, family and friends, and the list goes on. Both the mayor and I continue to search for any additional assets to bring to the area to assist families looking for solutions,” he said.
McNeill then turned the meeting over to ARC’s Deputy Legal Counsel and Director of External Affairs Johnathan Gay, who said he was very pleased with the welcome they had received from the community and its leaders before giving an overview of ARC.
“At any given moment we are treating over 1,000 people residentially; We see people from ages 18 to 82 and we treat everybody regardless of age, race, color, creed, gender orientation or anything else. And we treat them with grace as we are a faith-based company though we are science grounded,” Gay said.
He said that ARC is always looking for opportunities to bring its services to new parts of Kentucky to help more people reach long-term recovery.
Gay then introduced the Vice President of Marketing Vanessa Keeton, to give background information on how ARC started and the personal impact it had on her life.
“Well ARC started in 2008 (founded by CEO Jim Robinson) as a non-profit organization called Odyssey (which is still around) and at the time it was just a referral source. From 2008 until 2010 Jim Robinson would sometimes have to scrape change together to drive people to treatment,” Keeton said.
She explained that Robinson was an alcoholic who found God, he had been an attorney but after having a deeply religious experience he resigned his position and started the non-profit organization.
“On Dec. 2, 2010, he (Robinson) opened Karen’s Place, our first residential center and I was the first resident (she also mentions all staff were volunteers at that time). I had no idea what recovery was going to look like; it was very unfamiliar to me at the time,” Keeton said.
She explained that she had been in active addiction for 13 years at the time she went to Karen’s Place and had for two years been injecting drugs intravenously.
“At the time only one person in my life had told me to get treatment, and it was somebody that was getting high with me while telling me to seek help. I was just like “why should I sit here and take advice from a person that’s getting high with me? “They said I was young enough that it wasn’t too late for me to get help,” she said.
Keeton said she felt like the lowest of people and that if people had seen her then they wouldn’t want to be around her as chances were she would have tried to steal from them because that was the kind of lifestyle she was living.
“I came from a good home, I had good friends and a loving mother, I was a good student with top grades. And still, I just felt like I didn’t fit in and I wanted to fit in so badly that I started trying to fit in with the wrong type of people,” she said.
Keeton said entering Karen’s Place saved her life and that now she has a better life than she could’ve imagined even as a child when she would dream of her perfect life.
She then said that the company has continued to grow and now has many residential facilities throughout Kentucky, with more than 30 in- and outpatient programs in 21 counties.
“We have the largest treatment center in the US now, it used to be a college campus, now it’s called Crown Recovery Center. It’s an all-male facility that can house up to 750 men,” she said.
According to Keeton, residents may stay in the residential facilities as long as they need to even if their insurance has stopped paying. She said that many people relapse due to having to leave treatment facilities before they are ready, but that ARC is striving for truly helping to change people’s lives for the better and being a permanent solution.
Keeton then explained that after a person has been in treatment for six months they are eligible for internship programs through ARC.
“There are many programs they can choose from like we have carpentry, welding, culinary just to name a few and then they can also do residential programs and peer support specialists. I’d say about 50 percent of our employees are in recovery and 30 percent of our staff have actually come through the program,” she said.
Keeton said they treat the whole person — mind, body, and soul and that they want to see them recover in every area and build their confidence to become a person they didn’t know they could be with a life they didn’t know they could have.
“We want to see people with their families and lives restored, we want to see people pursue dreams they forgot they had,” she said.
At the end of the meeting, ARC’s Senior Director of Outpatient Services Jason Merrick led a training session on Narcan, a prescription medicine used for the treatment of a known or suspected opioid overdose
Merrick explained that Narcan only works on opioid overdoses and is non-toxic so even if you administer it to a different type of overdose, while it won’t work it also won’t hurt anybody. He distributed boxes of Narcan to those in attendance that wanted them.
