#SeeThePerson – Lori – Produced by the City of Hamilton
Dr. Lori Regenstreif – Addiction Medicine Specialist, Dept. of Family Medicine, McMaster University
My name is Lori Regenstreif, I live and work in Hamilton and I’m a doctor and an addiction medical specialist.
To come out and say that I have this story of this one time where I witnessed stigma experienced by one of my patients or I saw it happening myself is really challenging because for most of my patients it’s normal to experience stigma.
Where is the stigma coming from? Some of the drivers I think are really systemic structural and historical. I think it also comes from fear. People are afraid that, that’s a human just like me, could I be like that or I have a relative who has that problem, could they end up like that, that person is scary. The other thing is fear of the person when most of the time people are harmless.
There are people out there with severe alcohol or opioid abuse disorders who are working, who have families, they have children, they come home, they drive, they do all of those things, they pay their bills most of the time, they may have money problems, but they keep it under wraps, for whatever reasons they’ve got some protective factors that keep them from being visible. There’s a huge huge population in our society like that. They come to me eventually but it takes them awhile because of the stigma and because they don’t identify with the people in the street that we see. Meanwhile on the other end of the spectrum are people who have come to total desperation, they’ve lost everything, they may have not had everything in the first place and now they’ve lost whatever they did have, in terms of money, relationships, social supports, housing and of course we’re going to see them.
Substance use related stigma affects my clients in their ordinary lives and in their recovery because I absolutely believe that it sets them back and prevents them from being able to recover because it adds barriers to their attempts to get better… People will avoid coming to the hospital or doctor when they’re very very sick or they’ll avoid coming to see a nurse or somebody because they are ashamed of what they’ve done and they’re afraid of being told, “well you shouldn’t be doing that, why don’t you stop doing that?” and that’s classically people don’t understand, they don’t have any education perhaps or they don’t have training with working with substance use disorder… so their approach is very hurtful.
We have to educate ourselves, we have to educate each other, our children, our co-workers, our learners if we’re in a teaching position because it’s really the people around us and the people we look after that’s our society and if we can do all that I think we can really start to feel a shift.
