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Barrie, Ont. City Councillor Natalie Harris Makes Addiction Get-Well Cards
It’s so easy to think of drug addicts as problems and not people, Natalie Harris says. We see addiction as a moral failing, and addicts as simply lacking willpower, rather than people who are sick and struggling with dangerous and crippling conditions.
“There’s this massive stigma that people who battle with addiction can just choose to stop,” the Barrie, Ont. city counsellor told HuffPost Canada. Many people “don’t see that it’s a disease like any other disease.”
Harris, who’s in recovery for addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs, wants to change that perception. So, she started making cards.
“People battling addiction deserve get-well cards too,” she said.
The cards are homemade, filled with messages of encouragement and hope, and delivered to hospitals, shelters and rehab facilities. It’s the same idea as delivering a get-well card to someone hospitalized for broken bones or pneumonia: a small gesture can go a long way when you’re sick and vulnerable. But these small kindnesses often aren’t afforded to people hospitalized for addictions, Harris said.
She hears addicts talk about that stigma in many of the meetings she attends for her own recovery, she said. The topic was especially front-of-mind after she started reading the results of a citywide survey about how to make Barrie safer. The way many people in the city think about drug addicts shows the need for more compassion, she said.
“There’s still a lot of the perception that it’s not like cancer, it’s not like diabetes, it’s not a disease. and that’s just not the case,” she said. “It’s very much a disease.”
While medical professionals don’t unanimously agree that addiction should be classified as a disease, a landmark 2016 report by former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy bluntly stated that “addiction is not a character flaw — it is a chronic illness that we must approach with the same skill and compassion with which we approach heart...