Prodigal Magazine

As Scott Summers sat on the cold wooden floor of his parents’ kitchen, with his back leaning against the cabinets, he wondered if he had enough courage. He gripped the dark, wooden handle of the butcher’s knife and tapped the blade softly against the threads of his sweatshirt. He pulled the knife away, then pushed it forward, again and again, but never piercing the skin. “There’s gotta be another way to kill myself,” he thought.

This past fall, reflecting on this day four and a half years ago, Summers said he was at one of the lowest points of his life from his drug and alcohol use. “Every day was the worst day of my life,” he said. “I was barely surviving.”

Sitting just feet away from where he had pondered taking his life, Summers casually slurped down a bowl of Ramen noodles and talked about his rehabilitation in between spoonfuls. Wearing ripped jeans and a black T-shirt from Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker’s clothing line, he propped up his long legs on the chair next to him. “I feel pretty good about myself” now, he said, later adding, “If I didn’t have my faith, I wouldn’t have my sobriety.”

Summers, 23, of Youngstown, Ohio, is one in a relatively small number of young men nationwide who are receiving help for their addictions.
A recent survey on drug use by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that of the 23.2 million people over 11 who needed treatment for substance abuse and addiction in 2007, only 2.4 million, or about 10 percent, actually went to a treatment facility. The report said substance dependence or abuse was twice as high in men compared with women, and those between 18 and 25 were the largest age group affected.
For those who actually receive help, maintaining sobriety is another hurdle.
Another HHS report stated that 46 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds being admitted for substance abuse treatment in 2006 were repeat admissions.

Learning how to survive addiction is a challenge for young men, said Don Lewis, Director of the San Cristobal Academy, a group home for young men facing problems with substance abuse, among other issues, based on Taos, N.M. “You always hear about rehabilitation. Well that’s the man in his 40s,” he said. “He has those coping skills somewhere in the past to be able to allow him to function on a daily basis in society.” He added, “All the rest of that still weighs on these young men.”

Experts have recently been calling attention to the struggles with addiction that young males face. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a philanthropy based in Princeton, N.J., sponsored a global competition last year to reach what it referred to as young men “at risk.” The foundation offered funding to organizations coming up with solutions to combat issues affecting this demographic, including addiction and mental health care.

For Summers, recovery did not come easy. His drugs of choice – alcohol, cocaine and marijuana – had led him down a treacherous road. But his faith, his relationship with a recovered addict in his ‘40s and his attendance at a rehabilitation facility helped him change his life.

The first time Summers drank, after sneaking into his parents’ liquor cabinet at age 12, his father found him the next morning lying unconscious in a pool of his own vomit in the living room. After a cooling off period, Summers began his high school years regularly drinking and smoking marijuana. “If I didn’t smoke weed, I didn’t feel normal,” he said.

Heavy drinking led to a DUI arrest and charges of disorderly conduct during his freshman year at Youngstown State University. The next year, he added cocaine to the mix, snorting nearly every day. Summers ended up totaling his car and losing over $2,000 on a gambling-cocaine binge. “I lost complete control,” he said. “Everything that happened in my life was self inflicted.”

During the spring of his sophomore year at YSU, amid his drug and alcohol use, Summers sank into a deep depression. He had trouble concentrating in school and withdrew from friends and family. Instead of attending class, he slept in the stalls of the men’s restroom.

tFriends would rap on the door of his home, wondering where he had retreated, but Summers never moved from the couch in his living room, where he spent most of his time. Sometimes he went days without showering. “I would wake up every day and feel worse than the day before,” he said. “I just wanted it to end.”
James Helmuth, a psychologist and chemical dependency counselor in Akron, said addiction often leads to depression, when people become “so frustrated at living” that they lose all sense of hope. He said discouragement becomes despair and then withdrawal from others, which can be the beginning of clinical depression and result in suicide attempts.

Summers finally reached his breaking point in the fall of 2004. While he could not pierce his skin with the knife, he was able to down a bottle of No-Doz and Advil. He sat in the campus library waiting to die as sweat trickled down his forehead. Other than feeling like hell, nothing happened. “I’m such a screw-up and can’t even kill myself,” he thought.

In the spring of 2005, after unsuccessful recovery attempts through Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, two trips to a psychiatric ward and an outpatient program, Summers said he knew he needed a change.  Help came from an unusual place – a religious retreat with men more than twice his age.

After seeing other men, including his uncle, attend a religious “renewal” at St. Christine’s parish in Youngstown, Summers decided to give it a try. The first morning of the retreat, after hearing one of the men give a talk, Summers spotted Joe Dunlap, a recovered addict whom he had heard helped others. With red hair and arms the size of basketballs, Summers said, Dunlap looked a bit threatening. “He’s not somebody you would want to get upset.”

While feeling timid at first, Summers eventually walked over to Dunlap. Before he knew it, he was sharing his story. “He said something like, ‘You gotta pull God through your sobriety, and if you don’t pull God through your sobriety, you won’t stay sober,” Summers said. “He gave me this calming feeling – that if I continued to build a relationship with him, that eventually, I was going to be successful in sobriety.”

Dunlap, 45, a superintendent at the Youngstown water department, said he knew when he met Summers that the journey would not be easy. “I knew that was going to be a challenge going in,” he said. “The struggles that Scottie would face, or anybody young … is that they think, ‘Oh no, my life is over. I can never drink again. I can never have fun. I can never be a young adult.’ But you can. I’ve had the most fun since I’ve been clean and sober that I’ve ever had in my entire life.”

Dunlap said that at the time of the renewal, Summers did not know if he was ready to give up drinking, being that he was just shy of 21. “Well thank God for that,” Dunlap said. “If I had only got it when I was 20 or 21, I would have avoided a whole lot of misery.”

Summers’ struggles did not end after meeting Dunlap, however. This was just the beginning of his recovery. After approximately eight months of sobriety, working a 12-step program with Dunlap and spending his 21st birthday playing golf with his dad, Summers relapsed. “They say you relapse in your head way before you actually do it,” he said.

In October 2005, Summers said he began to reason with himself that maybe he could have a drink. He knew he had been addicted to cocaine, but maybe alcohol was OK.

One Thursday night, he went out with a friend to a downtown bar called Jay Jay’s and met two girls. One of them ordered a round of shots. Summers hesitated before grabbing the glass. “I thought about it for a moment,” he said. “I couldn’t believe I was going to ruin my sobriety.” But then he thought, “She’s buying a shot for me. It would be rude to turn it down.” He took his first drink in eight months, and they all laughed about it.

That night, Summers added five beers to the mix and thought to himself, “This is manageable.” He was wrong. A handful of beers turned into getting drunk and high with friends almost every night.

One of the biggest hurdles young men face after treatment for drug and alcohol dependence is the social scene, said Susan Gatsos, a substance abuse counselor in Fairfax, Va., who has worked with young male addicts. “If that was their whole life, then they have to learn some new stuff and be able to get comfortable with being somebody at a bar with their friends that orders club soda,” she said.

Amid his partying, Summers began taking money from his parents and selling their possessions to pay for his habits. “We knew he was stealing,” Scott Summers, Sr., said. “We just sensed that he had a problem, and we didn’t know how severe the problem was.”

He also stopped calling Dunlap. “When you quit hearing from somebody, you know something’s going on,” Dunlap said.

Summer, Sr., and his wife, Cheryl, decided to take drastic measures. On November 29, 2005, they told their son they were going to have him arrested for theft unless he went to the Glenbeigh rehabilitation facility near Cleveland. “We felt he was out of control,” Summers, Sr., said, “and we felt that was our last resort, our last hope.” Begrudgingly, Summers agreed to go.

Brad Price, the clinical director at Glenbeigh who is also a recovered addict, said individuals like Summers do not often relapse because of major life events. “Addicts don’t relapse because they run into mountains,” he said. “We relapse because we trip over mole hills.” He added, “We start cutting corners, cut down on meeting attendance, stop AA, stop talking to sponsors, hang out at the places where we used. When that impulse to get high hits, we’ve dismantled that support structure that allowed us to stay sober.”

After arriving at the facility, Summers said he hugged his parents good-bye and took a drug test before settling into his hospital-like bedroom. The next day, after attending several group meetings and talking with his counselor, Summers said he began feeling different.

“I don’t want to live like this anymore,” he said to himself. Then, everything clicked.
“I’m in bed one night,” he said, and began to think, “I gotta do this. I’m going to take control of my life.”

Summers said he got out of bed and knelt down on the cement floor with a thin layer of carpeting, wincing from the pain. Facing the bed, he propped up his elbows and clasped his hands. “I prayed so hard,” he said. “God, just please help me stay sober, whatever it takes. Just take this away from me. I can’t do this alone.” Then came redemption.

“All of a sudden – I don’t know how to describe it,” he said. “I had a new outlook on life.” This time, the sobriety stuck.

Summers began attending AA regularly, repaired his relationship with his parents, dropped old friends who used and began to finish his 12-step program with Dunlap.

Summers, Sr., who lost his father on the eve of his 5th birthday from drunk driving, said he regained his best friend. “He is so strong right now,” he said. “I idolize him. He’s really turned his life around.”
Back in the suburbs of Youngstown, several designer T-shirts were spread out on Summers’ bed, drying after being washed. A Dave Matthews Band poster hung over the headboard. A book on Alcoholics Anonymous and a Bible sat on his bedside stand.

Summers was excited. He was preparing to speak at a men’s religious retreat in February. He said he had bonded with the older men on the renewal team, some of whom were recovered addicts. “I find myself being able to have good conversations and sometimes even better conversations with guys that may be in their 40s and 50s,” he said. “I could talk to any one of them, any time, about anything.”

Summers said that at times he continues to struggle with his sobriety, especially when he goes out to the bars with his younger friends. “Sometimes I think, ‘Wow, that beer looks really good. That would really hit the spot right now. I wish I could, but I know I can’t. And that’s fine.’”

Still, he remained optimistic about the future.

“Every day may not be the greatest day,” he said, “but as long as I stay sober, it’s a good day.”