Ryan Caldwell is a peer support specialist in long-term recovery, working for the Restorative Management Corporation and involved with the HEALing Communities Study. Ryan talks about breaking the silence about stigma and substance use.
Video length: 1:17
Transcript
Ryan speaking:
When you're dealing and you're battling with the disease of addiction, we feel like we're being judged.
We feel like people don't understand what we're going through and we have a lot of shame.
We have a lot of guilt from things we may have done.
So, having lived experience and listening to someone, letting them talk, giving them a safe place to talk about maybe something that they may have done that they feel really guilty about or just feelings and being able to say hey, me too, I went through that also.
We call it the hope shot because it's like you just gave that person the hope shot.
There's like 25 million people in our country that are in recovery and imagine if they all spoke out at the same time, how many doctors, teachers and lawyers and nurses and just all these people.
It would be so much more normalized I think, that it wouldn't be such a tough thing to get help for.