Film presents a personal understanding of addiction and recovery

By Ruth Melville

Anyone who pays attention to the news knows that the country is in the midst of an opioid epidemic. The state of Connecticut has been hard hit, and the northwest corner is not immune. According to a recent report, “Beneath the Surface: The Opioid Epidemic in Northwest Connecticut,” researched and written by Norfolk resident Julie Scharnberg of the Northwest Connecticut Community Foundation, over half the towns in northwest Connecticut have reported opioid-related deaths.

There are local groups devoted to fighting opioid addiction, such as the Litchfield County Opiate Task force, led by the McCall Center for Behavioral Heath and Charlotte Hungerford Hospital. But the sheer extent of the crisis can make it seem overwhelming and intractable.

Hope Payson (center), Maria Skinner and Daryl McGraw before their presentation at the Norfolk Library.

Hope Payson, a licensed clinical social worker practicing in Winsted, wants to shift the focus to why people become addicted and how they can recover. Decades of working in the field have led her to see a strong connection between trauma and addiction. The more stress in a person’s background, the more vulnerable they are to addiction, whether to food, porn, video games, shopping—or drugs. The widespread availability of more lethal drugs, whether prescription painkillers or cheap heroin, has led to the dramatic increase in drug-related deaths.

Payson says that trying to control substances, putting people in prison, the forty-year-old failed “war” on drugs—these strategies didn’t change the outcome. In her years of experience, which included doing outreach work with the homeless, she also found that drug treatment alone was not enough to get people to remain sober. She argues that attention must be paid not just to the availability of drugs but to the need for them, which she thinks is related to trauma, neglect and cultural issues such as racism and oppression.

For years Payson has been doing presentations—in person or via online streaming—on understanding addiction, usually to other therapists. But as the crisis showed no signs of abating, it became important to her to branch out to a more general audience. Earlier this winter, for example, she hosted a presentation at Norfolk Library, along with Maria Coutant Skinner, executive director of the McCall Center, and Daryl McGraw, who himself struggled with addiction and went to prison, but is now in recovery and advocates for others who were formerly incarcerated.

But Payson, who has her own history of trauma and addiction, was looking for other ways to educate the public about the causes of addiction and the interventions that have been successful in saving lives. In particular, she wanted “to give a more personal understanding of what addiction and recovery look like.” To that end, about two years ago she invited 12 local people in recovery to come together to be interviewed and filmed by Tory Jadow, a local filmmaker. Impressed by the participants’ openness and intensity, Payson and Jadow decided to form a nonprofit, RC Productions, to produce a film about their stories.

The resulting documentary, called “Recovering Community: A Documentary of Hope,” is now in the final stages of production. The entire project is very much rooted in the Northwest Corner. The director comes from Cornwall, the crew and the recoverers are local, and most of the money raised for the film came from local donors.

Payson hopes to have a rough-cut version of the film by May, which she plans to show to the Litchfield Opiate Task Force for feedback. Once those comments have been integrated, the film project will raise funds for the final edit. You can see clips from the film on the project’s Facebook page.

Payson is pleased with how the project has come together. The film shows “real people talking about their lives. Not just people dying, but people moving on with their lives. My work is all about people getting better. I want to show how people got there, how people got better.”

The report “Beneath the Service: The Opioid Epidemic in Northwest Connecticut” is available on the Northwest Connecticut Community Foundation’s website, northwestcf.org.

Photo by Christelli Brunner.