COASTAL OBSERVER

Susan Myers is a counselor at Tidelands Health, but last fall she was selling drugs to people already enmeshed in a web of addiction. She was only playing a role in a program called Empathy in Action that helps people see life through the eyes of people with mental health and substance abuse problems. But it was one she knew well after 25 years in recovery herself.

Last week, Myers was back in her role as counselor for a follow-up session that looked for ways public and private organizations can collaborate to help solve those problems.

“We’re the ones that get the referrals,” Myers said. “We’re collaborating locally.”

But Myers also had another role. 

She apologized to the 40 people gathered in the county judicial center, because she had to leave early. Her husband had overdosed two days before and was still in the hospital. He had suffered his third stroke in six months, she said, and was also battling stage three cancer.

“Personally, it’s a vendetta for me,” Myers said.

 Empathy in Action’s simulation is based on actual cases in South Carolina, but participants have often lived through those situations, said Jessica Seel, director of behavioral health initiatives for the S.C. Office of Rural Health, the nonprofit that created the program.

“We don’t know what people have been through or experienced,” she said. “It’s hard to tell your personal stories like that.”

Based on population, Georgetown County ranked first among the state’s 46 counties in hospitalizations for opioids in 2023, according to the state Department of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Services. It ranked fourth for deaths from opioid overdoses that year, the last for which data is available.

The county has a Behavioral Health Collaborative that is working to change that. One goal of Empathy in Action is to help the members of the collaborative understand each other’s challenges, said Leigh Boan, the county Probate Court judge.

“It is our collective input and commitment to make a difference that will bring about impactful and positive results,” she said.

The group that met last week identified many needs: education, transportation, treatment facilities and empathy. And they agreed that mental health and substance abuse should not be addressed as separate issues.

“The biggest thing that came out of this group,” Georgetown Mayor Carol Jayroe said, “is we do not have a mental health facility. The sheriff’s department, the police department pick them up, take them to the hospital. They’re there three or four days and they’re out. Then they come back a week later.”

But Haley Scharlau, a community engagement specialist for the Georgetown County Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission, said it isn’t only facilities.

“My ex-husband suffered very, very heavily with SUD, substance use disorder,” she said. “I saw if first-hand, in-house every day.”

His family sent him to treatment facilities around the country. Nothing helped except medication, she said.

Sometimes, he would lie and say he was suicidal in order to get treatment. “He wanted it. At times he wanted it,” Scharlau said. “Nothing ever helped him.”

After 15 years, he became clean, she added. “He’s clean now, as far as I know.”

While she agreed that resources are lacking, Sharlau said the structure of those resources is important.

There are four needs, said Dr. Victor Archambeau, a family physician with Tidelands Health who specializes in recovery: housing, health care, helpers and hope. Those are the elements that provide a 95 percent success rate for professionals with substance abuse.

“Somebody off the street has a 5 to 10 percent chance of staying in recovery for five years,” he said.

Archambeau described a typical patient: “Dropped out of school at 16. Uses drugs. Pregnant at 17. DSS has her child. A couple of shoplifting charges, maybe a possession with intent. Another child at 20. DSS has the child. Now she’s 23. She gets sent to treatment for 30 days; gets a pat on the back. Good luck, go forth an prosper.”

While a professional has safe housing, the typical patient may be homeless or go “back to the house where her mom taught her to shoot drugs when she was 17. She’s not going to succeed,” Archambeau said.

She doesn’t have health care and Medicaid won’t help unless she becomes pregnant again.

Professionals have mentors and mandatory drug screening. The typical patient, Archambeau said, “doesn’t have anybody she’s got to respond to or any accountability.”

The professional can return to a career.

“She has no education. She has a criminal record. What hope does she have?” Archambeau said.

What’s needed is a system of care that is focused on recovery, he said. “Everything, long-term, is designed to help her stay safe.”

She can get a high school equivalency diploma and take classes at Horry-Georgetown Tech for free. The solicitor’s office can expunge her record.

“I don’t think it takes a lot of money,” Archambeau said. “What it takes is a lot of dedication.”

There are some success stories. The Georgetown County Sheriff’s Office has a grant to start a “deflection program” that will help people who are arrested for mental health problems get treatment rather than jail time.

Damascus House, a ministry based at Pawleys Island Community Church that helps jail inmates with alcohol and drug abuses, is developing a plan for a recovery center, said Jim Coggin, the group’s president.

Frank McClary, the mayor of Andrews, was invited to the fall session of Empathy in Action. He was given the role of a female sex worker who grew up in foster homes. She was able to get off drugs, but unable to help her 19-year-old son, who died of an overdose.

“It was so impactful,” McClary said.  He left the follow-up session with a book and a package of Narcan.

He was a little concerned that nothing seems to have happened since September.

“We’re still talking about it,” McClary said. “We have to stay involved.”

Seel said she saw signs of progress and liked the fact that participants were “dreaming big.”

“We’re moving the needle,” she said afterward. “We need to learn what it feels like to be in different shoes, which is what Empathy in Action is. It’s a walk in those shoes, and that’s important. That’s when you really learn the truth.”