Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Posted in
Life
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(I wrote this article a full decade ago for a blog that I never started. I think it's very interesting, so I decided to include it here. I don't know what has happened to this fellow.)
A friend of mine, whom I'll call Geoff, has a drug problem. His behavior in some ways is so irresponsible that it is hard to be sympathetic with him, and I am having difficulty understanding how much of his behavior is due to his addiction and how much is due to his own personality. I spoke to a former alcoholic recently who said that most addicts are very immature, and that is their real problem. On the other hand, Geoff claims to have been sexually abused by his father when he was a boy. Not knowing what that is like, I can't assess the impact it had on him (if it's true).
I met Geoff when I hired him on a job. He is from a middle-class family, and both his parents are still alive. I was fired from that job about four months later (for blowing the whistle on illegal activities at the firm), but Geoff and I remained friends. While we were still working together, Geoff's mother used her credit and money to get him a co-op apartment. She also bought him appliances and furniture. I didn't know then that he had had a drug problem before, and that she was trying to help him develop a stable life. About half a year after I left the firm, I got Geoff a job at a new firm. He was very grateful and told me repeatedly that the new job was perfect for him.
Geoff's life started falling apart soon after he got his co-op. He had been "clean" for a while but started using drugs again, and drinking sometimes. Later I found out that during this period he used cocaine, heroin (once or twice), ecstasy, and GHB (the knock-out, date-rape drug). Astonishingly, he was using GHB as a sleeping pill. We would be "chatting" on America Online and suddenly Geoff would stop responding, and I would learn the next day that he had taken GHB and become unconscious at his desk. (At that time, I didn't know what GHB was and I accepted what he told me about it. Now I know that it can cause brain damage.)
Geoff was convinced that he had a chemical imbalance in his brain and that he needed to take drugs to achieve a balance (that was one of his reasons for taking GHB). In addition to the illegal drugs, he was taking tranquilizers, and he sometimes took large doses of cough syrup to get high.
Geoff was the best operator in his department at work, but even so, things started to fall apart. Although he said he loved the job, he left it for another job, and then begged to be taken back when the other job didn't please him (they took him back). Then his drug use started to increase, and he went on short-term disability for a month (that alone will cause many employers to fire you). When he returned, things continued to go downhill. He often worked unsupervised, and he would take two-hour dinner breaks or leave early (he worked the second shift). He also began to look dishevelled and dopey, and his speech sometimes slurred. They finally fired him when he started to fall asleep at his desk.
On the home front, things were falling apart also. He developed relationships with other drug addicts – some of them dangerous types – and he got in trouble with the other apartment-owners when his friends started doing drugs in the hallways.
I lost touch with Geoff for a while, and later I learned that during that time he had attempted suicide and, on another occasion, overdosed, and that he had been in two drug treatment programs. Since he was no longer occupying his co-op or paying the maintenance, his mother had sold it.
One day Geoff called me up from New England and said he was leaving his treatment program and coming to New York. Not knowing what I was letting myself in for, I invited him to stay with me. I didn't realize that if I had said no, Geoff would have remained in treatment. I just assumed that he had completed the program and was being discharged.
Geoff turned out to be about the worst roommate that anyone could have. I say "roommate" because, when it became clear that he would be staying for a while, I insisted that he share in the rent (he got the money from his mother). Initially, however, Greg showed up with only a small amount of money, and I had to lend him $100. He smoked non-stop, and the apartment quickly became permanently smoky. (Sometimes he would lean out the window, but the smoke would drift inside, and he would leave butts on the window sill.) Everywhere he went in the apartment, he left trash for me to pick up, and he never did any cleaning. His bed and the area around it became increasingly trash laden. I finally insisted that he clean up the area, in response to which he picked up about half the trash and considered himself done.
Midway through the visit (which lasted about seven weeks) I couldn't stand the smoke any longer and I asked him to go outside to smoke, which he agreed to do. Literally 30 seconds after that conversation was over, he lit up a cigarette in his bed. When I confronted him, he said he had "forgotten" what we had just talked about. It wasn't just the smoking that bothered me, but that he didn't seem to care that it bothered me.
Geoff was depressed much of the time he was here. At 31, he felt that his life was over because he had lost his job and co-op (although he hadn't valued either of them when he had them). I tried to convince him that losing material things was unimportant, and that he could get another co-op and another job. But he clung to his obsession that his life was over because he had lost those things. I gave him a lot of pep talks, but his attitude remained relentlessly negative.
Geoff never gave me back any of the emotional support that I gave him, and that bothered me. When we spoke, he always brought the subject back to himself. His own problems were all that he could think about. If I described one of my own problems to him, his advice would be short and shallow, and soon we'd be talking about him again.
One thing I couldn't shake him out of was the belief that happiness could be found in a bottle, whether a bottle of alcohol or a bottle of pills. I found this particularly disturbing because he hadn't seemed to learn anything from his bad drug experiences. He continued to self-medicate, using over-the-counter drugs in ways they weren't supposed to be used. He would take as many as 20-30 kava root capsules at one time because they gave him a "buzz" (the directions said to take two). He also got hold of a bag of physician's drug samples from one of his drug friends, and that bothered me. In addition, he took large amounts of analgesics.
Geoff was still convinced that he had a chemical imbalance in his brain which he had to treat. I argued that if he went off all drugs, ate nutritiously, and got enough sleep, his body would find its natural stasis, and his depressions might subside. But he never gave that a chance.
Geoff was most depressed at the beginning of our visit, and he slept for hours and hours, which was an annoyance because he was sleeping in the living room; but things did improve for a while. He started going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and they gave him some feeling of community. He was getting out of the house for longer periods of time, and he would come home with positive things to say. He told me that he prayed on occasion, which was encouraging. In addition, he was taking whatever work he could get (work keeps a person from getting too self-absorbed).
But Geoff continued to be a lousy roommate. On three or four occasions he forgot to lock the front door, which is very dangerous in New York City. Once, he got sick on kava root pills and threw up all over the toilet (ON the toilet, not IN the toilet), and left it for me to clean up (that was the only time I yelled at him). On two occasions he didn't pull the shower curtain all the way closed and soaked the bathroom rug. Once, he needed to urinate while I was using the bathroom, so he urinated in a bottle and left it on the kitchen counter for me to discover the next day. (Yes, I sniffed it to find out what it was.)
He would frequently fall asleep at 8 or 9 in the evening. That was particularly annoying because, being a night person, I stay up very late. I hated being confined to my bedroom and tiptoeing around the apartment in the dark. I found out later that he was taking Benedryl early in the evening to put himself to sleep, and that he could have stayed up later if he had wanted to. Even after I complained about how early he was going to sleep, he continued to do that. Naturally, he would wake up at 4:00 a.m. every morning, and then he would complain that he was waking up too early.
In an attempt to be helpful, he did do the laundry twice. However, the first time he forgot that he was doing it and left the building before it was finished. The clothes came back encrusted with dried detergent, and some of my socks went missing.
I should point out that Geoff is not stupid. He is extremely intelligent and has a mind for trivia. But he doesn't seem to have any presence of mind. Everything he does is done sloppily and carelessly, even to the extent of dropping food on the floor when he eats. Twice I watched him make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He didn't spread the jelly smoothly, and when he held the sandwich to his mouth, jelly fell on the floor. He didn't notice either time that he had dropped jelly. In other words, he didn't have the presence of mind to hold his sandwich closed so the contents didn't drop out. It was like watching a child.
In order to get Geoff to move out, I had to give him deadlines, which I ended up extending several times. Every time I gave him a deadline, he would fall back into a depression and start sleeping during the day again. He kept saying that he would commit suicide if he had to leave. My advice to him was to go to the YMCA and use that time to find a rooming situation, after which he could save his money to get an apartment. But he didn't want to go to the Y and he didn't want to bother looking for a room.
Instead, he decided to go to San Diego, where he had stayed once before (and taken drugs). His only reason for going there was that he knew of a place to stay. However, on the day he was supposed to leave, I insisted that he call them and find out if he could stay there, and he couldn't; so once again I had to extend his deadline for leaving.
Getting him out was turning into a crisis, so I called his parents. His mother, who had mostly supported him in the previous year, offered to send him $1,000, and that cheered him up. While talking to his parents, I learned that his behavior had been bad everywhere he went, and that he was slowly alienating everyone. He smoked like a chimney everywhere he stayed, and he did stupid things, like flushing a steak down his father's toilet, which caused a flood and required the services of a plumber.
I was with him when he packed his stuff, and like a retarded person, he simply didn't notice all of his possessions lying around the room, and he would have left them if I hadn't pointed them out to him (even so, he ended up leaving things, as well as boxes for me to ship to him). After he left, I discovered about a dozen cigarette burn holes in the sheets on his bed, some of them going through the top layer of the mattress pad – in other words, he could have set the apartment on fire (thank heavens for fire-retardant materials!).
Geoff ended up in a treatment program in California, and then traveled to Florida, where his father lives. During his travels, he did his usual stupid things, losing his money on one occasion and his luggage on another occasion, and then leaving his new luggage containing his new clothes (which his mother had bought him) unattended, so that it was stolen.
In Florida, his father took him in, but he wasn't happy there, and in early July he called me up hinting that he needed a place to stay. I purposely didn't pick up on the hints, so a week later he called again and asked if he could stay with me. I had once promised that I would take him back if things didn't work out, but I decided that I couldn't, and I said no.
Nonetheless, three days later he showed up in New York City (where I live) and called me from Times Square, hinting that he needed a place to stay. I think he was genuinely surprised when I told him to check into the YMCA and then give me a call. (I would have accompanied him to the Y, but I was working that evening.) After getting off the phone, I called his father to make sure that Greg actually had the money to stay at the Y, and his father said that he did.
But Geoff didn't go to the Y. Instead, he got in touch with an old drug friend who promised to take him in. They ended up drinking and drugging that night, and Geoff took cocaine. The drug friend ditched him late in the evening, and Geoff ended up sleeping under an elevated highway. He then checked himself into a psychiatric ward. When he got out of the hospital, he again slept on the street, this time under a truck in the hope that it would run over him. The police found him and checked him into yet another hospital.
I visited Geoff in the psychiatric ward, and I was actually glad to see him (I still like him). I told him that if he would go to the Y and start helping himself, I would be a good friend and help him out as much as I could; but that as long as he was playing this dependency game, I wouldn't help him. He was released from the hospital a couple days later and checked into a rooming house. He then came to visit me, and I typed his résumé, and we went shopping for work clothes (his mother had given him some money). A few days later he visited me again, and he told me that he had gone on two job interviews.
It appeared to me that Geoff was on the road to recovery, but that was not to last. At the end of his first week in the rooming house (which, admittedly, wasn't the nicest place), he called his mother complaining about how unhappy he was. He must have given her quite a sob story, because she suggested that he go back into the hospital. Using his mother's suggestion as an excuse, he checked into a psychiatric ward at Bellevue where, as of today (7/30/00), he still is.
I have spoken to him on the phone and visited him there, and he looks awful. When I ask him why he went back into the hospital, he variously gives his mother's recommendation as an excuse, and then says that he "had no place to go" (although he didn't need to "go" anywhere since he already had a room). He also says that he was worried that he would run out of money, although he did have enough money to get the room for one more week (and there was no reason to believe his mother wouldn't send him more). From where I sit, it looks as if Geoff just couldn't stand to be independent.
I have come to see his mother as being an "enabler". She enables his behavior by leaving the money spigot turned on. I remember how negative my reaction was three years ago when she bought him his co-op apartment and then furnished it for him – what 30'ish man needs that kind of help from his parents? I should be more sympathetic, however. Clearly, she is worried that if she turns the money spigot off, he'll deteriorate and die.
I asked Geoff once what would happen if his mother cut him off entirely (i.e., no more money), and he said, "I wouldn't survive." When I pointed out to him that a 31-year-old single man should not need his mother's help to survive, and that the world is full of 31-year-olds who are supporting not just themselves but their wives and children, he conceded that I had a point.
Geoff's future is looking increasingly grim. The longer he stays in psychiatric wards, the more feeble he becomes (they are not healing places!). When I visited him recently, I noticed that he was trembling. His unstable condition is obvious even to strangers, which is probably why nothing came of the job interviews he went on. It doesn't help that he misses about 20% of his facial hair when he shaves, and that his clothes are not ironed.
But I still feel that he is responsible for his predicament. If he didn't keep sabotaging himself, he might make some progress. His attitude is the real problem: As long as he thinks that he needs his mother to survive, then he won't be able to make it on his own. He is unwilling to take the normal steps that any adult must take to be self-sufficient.
A friend of mine, whom I'll call Geoff, has a drug problem. His behavior in some ways is so irresponsible that it is hard to be sympathetic with him, and I am having difficulty understanding how much of his behavior is due to his addiction and how much is due to his own personality. I spoke to a former alcoholic recently who said that most addicts are very immature, and that is their real problem. On the other hand, Geoff claims to have been sexually abused by his father when he was a boy. Not knowing what that is like, I can't assess the impact it had on him (if it's true).
I met Geoff when I hired him on a job. He is from a middle-class family, and both his parents are still alive. I was fired from that job about four months later (for blowing the whistle on illegal activities at the firm), but Geoff and I remained friends. While we were still working together, Geoff's mother used her credit and money to get him a co-op apartment. She also bought him appliances and furniture. I didn't know then that he had had a drug problem before, and that she was trying to help him develop a stable life. About half a year after I left the firm, I got Geoff a job at a new firm. He was very grateful and told me repeatedly that the new job was perfect for him.
Geoff's life started falling apart soon after he got his co-op. He had been "clean" for a while but started using drugs again, and drinking sometimes. Later I found out that during this period he used cocaine, heroin (once or twice), ecstasy, and GHB (the knock-out, date-rape drug). Astonishingly, he was using GHB as a sleeping pill. We would be "chatting" on America Online and suddenly Geoff would stop responding, and I would learn the next day that he had taken GHB and become unconscious at his desk. (At that time, I didn't know what GHB was and I accepted what he told me about it. Now I know that it can cause brain damage.)
Geoff was convinced that he had a chemical imbalance in his brain and that he needed to take drugs to achieve a balance (that was one of his reasons for taking GHB). In addition to the illegal drugs, he was taking tranquilizers, and he sometimes took large doses of cough syrup to get high.
Geoff was the best operator in his department at work, but even so, things started to fall apart. Although he said he loved the job, he left it for another job, and then begged to be taken back when the other job didn't please him (they took him back). Then his drug use started to increase, and he went on short-term disability for a month (that alone will cause many employers to fire you). When he returned, things continued to go downhill. He often worked unsupervised, and he would take two-hour dinner breaks or leave early (he worked the second shift). He also began to look dishevelled and dopey, and his speech sometimes slurred. They finally fired him when he started to fall asleep at his desk.
On the home front, things were falling apart also. He developed relationships with other drug addicts – some of them dangerous types – and he got in trouble with the other apartment-owners when his friends started doing drugs in the hallways.
I lost touch with Geoff for a while, and later I learned that during that time he had attempted suicide and, on another occasion, overdosed, and that he had been in two drug treatment programs. Since he was no longer occupying his co-op or paying the maintenance, his mother had sold it.
One day Geoff called me up from New England and said he was leaving his treatment program and coming to New York. Not knowing what I was letting myself in for, I invited him to stay with me. I didn't realize that if I had said no, Geoff would have remained in treatment. I just assumed that he had completed the program and was being discharged.
Geoff turned out to be about the worst roommate that anyone could have. I say "roommate" because, when it became clear that he would be staying for a while, I insisted that he share in the rent (he got the money from his mother). Initially, however, Greg showed up with only a small amount of money, and I had to lend him $100. He smoked non-stop, and the apartment quickly became permanently smoky. (Sometimes he would lean out the window, but the smoke would drift inside, and he would leave butts on the window sill.) Everywhere he went in the apartment, he left trash for me to pick up, and he never did any cleaning. His bed and the area around it became increasingly trash laden. I finally insisted that he clean up the area, in response to which he picked up about half the trash and considered himself done.
Midway through the visit (which lasted about seven weeks) I couldn't stand the smoke any longer and I asked him to go outside to smoke, which he agreed to do. Literally 30 seconds after that conversation was over, he lit up a cigarette in his bed. When I confronted him, he said he had "forgotten" what we had just talked about. It wasn't just the smoking that bothered me, but that he didn't seem to care that it bothered me.
Geoff was depressed much of the time he was here. At 31, he felt that his life was over because he had lost his job and co-op (although he hadn't valued either of them when he had them). I tried to convince him that losing material things was unimportant, and that he could get another co-op and another job. But he clung to his obsession that his life was over because he had lost those things. I gave him a lot of pep talks, but his attitude remained relentlessly negative.
Geoff never gave me back any of the emotional support that I gave him, and that bothered me. When we spoke, he always brought the subject back to himself. His own problems were all that he could think about. If I described one of my own problems to him, his advice would be short and shallow, and soon we'd be talking about him again.
One thing I couldn't shake him out of was the belief that happiness could be found in a bottle, whether a bottle of alcohol or a bottle of pills. I found this particularly disturbing because he hadn't seemed to learn anything from his bad drug experiences. He continued to self-medicate, using over-the-counter drugs in ways they weren't supposed to be used. He would take as many as 20-30 kava root capsules at one time because they gave him a "buzz" (the directions said to take two). He also got hold of a bag of physician's drug samples from one of his drug friends, and that bothered me. In addition, he took large amounts of analgesics.
Geoff was still convinced that he had a chemical imbalance in his brain which he had to treat. I argued that if he went off all drugs, ate nutritiously, and got enough sleep, his body would find its natural stasis, and his depressions might subside. But he never gave that a chance.
Geoff was most depressed at the beginning of our visit, and he slept for hours and hours, which was an annoyance because he was sleeping in the living room; but things did improve for a while. He started going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and they gave him some feeling of community. He was getting out of the house for longer periods of time, and he would come home with positive things to say. He told me that he prayed on occasion, which was encouraging. In addition, he was taking whatever work he could get (work keeps a person from getting too self-absorbed).
But Geoff continued to be a lousy roommate. On three or four occasions he forgot to lock the front door, which is very dangerous in New York City. Once, he got sick on kava root pills and threw up all over the toilet (ON the toilet, not IN the toilet), and left it for me to clean up (that was the only time I yelled at him). On two occasions he didn't pull the shower curtain all the way closed and soaked the bathroom rug. Once, he needed to urinate while I was using the bathroom, so he urinated in a bottle and left it on the kitchen counter for me to discover the next day. (Yes, I sniffed it to find out what it was.)
He would frequently fall asleep at 8 or 9 in the evening. That was particularly annoying because, being a night person, I stay up very late. I hated being confined to my bedroom and tiptoeing around the apartment in the dark. I found out later that he was taking Benedryl early in the evening to put himself to sleep, and that he could have stayed up later if he had wanted to. Even after I complained about how early he was going to sleep, he continued to do that. Naturally, he would wake up at 4:00 a.m. every morning, and then he would complain that he was waking up too early.
In an attempt to be helpful, he did do the laundry twice. However, the first time he forgot that he was doing it and left the building before it was finished. The clothes came back encrusted with dried detergent, and some of my socks went missing.
I should point out that Geoff is not stupid. He is extremely intelligent and has a mind for trivia. But he doesn't seem to have any presence of mind. Everything he does is done sloppily and carelessly, even to the extent of dropping food on the floor when he eats. Twice I watched him make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He didn't spread the jelly smoothly, and when he held the sandwich to his mouth, jelly fell on the floor. He didn't notice either time that he had dropped jelly. In other words, he didn't have the presence of mind to hold his sandwich closed so the contents didn't drop out. It was like watching a child.
In order to get Geoff to move out, I had to give him deadlines, which I ended up extending several times. Every time I gave him a deadline, he would fall back into a depression and start sleeping during the day again. He kept saying that he would commit suicide if he had to leave. My advice to him was to go to the YMCA and use that time to find a rooming situation, after which he could save his money to get an apartment. But he didn't want to go to the Y and he didn't want to bother looking for a room.
Instead, he decided to go to San Diego, where he had stayed once before (and taken drugs). His only reason for going there was that he knew of a place to stay. However, on the day he was supposed to leave, I insisted that he call them and find out if he could stay there, and he couldn't; so once again I had to extend his deadline for leaving.
Getting him out was turning into a crisis, so I called his parents. His mother, who had mostly supported him in the previous year, offered to send him $1,000, and that cheered him up. While talking to his parents, I learned that his behavior had been bad everywhere he went, and that he was slowly alienating everyone. He smoked like a chimney everywhere he stayed, and he did stupid things, like flushing a steak down his father's toilet, which caused a flood and required the services of a plumber.
I was with him when he packed his stuff, and like a retarded person, he simply didn't notice all of his possessions lying around the room, and he would have left them if I hadn't pointed them out to him (even so, he ended up leaving things, as well as boxes for me to ship to him). After he left, I discovered about a dozen cigarette burn holes in the sheets on his bed, some of them going through the top layer of the mattress pad – in other words, he could have set the apartment on fire (thank heavens for fire-retardant materials!).
Geoff ended up in a treatment program in California, and then traveled to Florida, where his father lives. During his travels, he did his usual stupid things, losing his money on one occasion and his luggage on another occasion, and then leaving his new luggage containing his new clothes (which his mother had bought him) unattended, so that it was stolen.
In Florida, his father took him in, but he wasn't happy there, and in early July he called me up hinting that he needed a place to stay. I purposely didn't pick up on the hints, so a week later he called again and asked if he could stay with me. I had once promised that I would take him back if things didn't work out, but I decided that I couldn't, and I said no.
Nonetheless, three days later he showed up in New York City (where I live) and called me from Times Square, hinting that he needed a place to stay. I think he was genuinely surprised when I told him to check into the YMCA and then give me a call. (I would have accompanied him to the Y, but I was working that evening.) After getting off the phone, I called his father to make sure that Greg actually had the money to stay at the Y, and his father said that he did.
But Geoff didn't go to the Y. Instead, he got in touch with an old drug friend who promised to take him in. They ended up drinking and drugging that night, and Geoff took cocaine. The drug friend ditched him late in the evening, and Geoff ended up sleeping under an elevated highway. He then checked himself into a psychiatric ward. When he got out of the hospital, he again slept on the street, this time under a truck in the hope that it would run over him. The police found him and checked him into yet another hospital.
I visited Geoff in the psychiatric ward, and I was actually glad to see him (I still like him). I told him that if he would go to the Y and start helping himself, I would be a good friend and help him out as much as I could; but that as long as he was playing this dependency game, I wouldn't help him. He was released from the hospital a couple days later and checked into a rooming house. He then came to visit me, and I typed his résumé, and we went shopping for work clothes (his mother had given him some money). A few days later he visited me again, and he told me that he had gone on two job interviews.
It appeared to me that Geoff was on the road to recovery, but that was not to last. At the end of his first week in the rooming house (which, admittedly, wasn't the nicest place), he called his mother complaining about how unhappy he was. He must have given her quite a sob story, because she suggested that he go back into the hospital. Using his mother's suggestion as an excuse, he checked into a psychiatric ward at Bellevue where, as of today (7/30/00), he still is.
I have spoken to him on the phone and visited him there, and he looks awful. When I ask him why he went back into the hospital, he variously gives his mother's recommendation as an excuse, and then says that he "had no place to go" (although he didn't need to "go" anywhere since he already had a room). He also says that he was worried that he would run out of money, although he did have enough money to get the room for one more week (and there was no reason to believe his mother wouldn't send him more). From where I sit, it looks as if Geoff just couldn't stand to be independent.
I have come to see his mother as being an "enabler". She enables his behavior by leaving the money spigot turned on. I remember how negative my reaction was three years ago when she bought him his co-op apartment and then furnished it for him – what 30'ish man needs that kind of help from his parents? I should be more sympathetic, however. Clearly, she is worried that if she turns the money spigot off, he'll deteriorate and die.
I asked Geoff once what would happen if his mother cut him off entirely (i.e., no more money), and he said, "I wouldn't survive." When I pointed out to him that a 31-year-old single man should not need his mother's help to survive, and that the world is full of 31-year-olds who are supporting not just themselves but their wives and children, he conceded that I had a point.
Geoff's future is looking increasingly grim. The longer he stays in psychiatric wards, the more feeble he becomes (they are not healing places!). When I visited him recently, I noticed that he was trembling. His unstable condition is obvious even to strangers, which is probably why nothing came of the job interviews he went on. It doesn't help that he misses about 20% of his facial hair when he shaves, and that his clothes are not ironed.
But I still feel that he is responsible for his predicament. If he didn't keep sabotaging himself, he might make some progress. His attitude is the real problem: As long as he thinks that he needs his mother to survive, then he won't be able to make it on his own. He is unwilling to take the normal steps that any adult must take to be self-sufficient.
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