By Dr. Tony Greco
Dr. Tony Greco is a disability rights advocate for mental health and addiction support and the founder of GET HELP.
In 1977, my parents met in an AA meeting. My mom was still a teenager and my dad had a couple of years sober in the program. She was a troubled youth; in addition to alcoholism, he could not read or write, and suffered from an undiagnosed mental illness. They found comfort in one another, as new people in recovery often do. If the stories can be believed, they married shortly after she got pregnant. And again, as new people in recovery often do, my mom relapsed and would not get sober for another 23 years. In 2001, that unexpected baby she had as a teenager, now a young man, picked her up from a psych hospital to drive her to American Hospital in downtown Los Angeles for, what would hopefully be, her last detox.
I have been trying to get my mom clean, sober or, at the very least, functional since I was 7 years old. Truth be told, my childhood was a battle ground of both my parents’ dysfunction. I can remember coming home from school one day at 15 years old to a completely barren house, for the exception of my things in my bedroom. I was alone, homeless and turning to the same familiar haunts and vices as my own parents did, in spite of all my attempts to be anything other than like them.
Addiction is a Symptom
I found myself looking to the same strangers in 12 steps meetings at 17 years old, and have been there ever since. Unlike my parents, those meetings worked for me, but it required coming to terms with things much greater than just addiction. Like many of us who turn to addiction, the problem is deeper than addiction. Addiction is a symptom. If we don’t stay clean or sober long enough to get to those underlying problems, we will surely return to the quick fixes and damage of addiction. But we need to get clean or sober before we can even begin to address the underlying things like trauma, depression, anxiety, bi-polar disorder or any number of the personality disorders that develop from the difficulties we face in our lives.
We give what we are given, and the pain and dysfunction is often systemic, often generational. We are living with the sins of the past, the sins of our fathers, mothers and those before them.
Since I started recovery at 17 to heal from those proverbial sins, I have always focused on trying to help others. It gave me a purpose. An anchor. I have spent the better part of my life always trying to find the ways and means to do that. That desire to help, and the series of events that has put me on every side of the problem, was the birth of what would become a company I started called GET HELP — which puts me on every side of the solution.
The Disabilities of Addiction and Mental Health
It was always difficult for me to understand that my parents had a mental illness, that they were disabled; initially by their respective diseases of addiction, but deeper still by their debilitating depression, anxiety, bi-polar or schizoaffective behaviors. Deeper still was the unresolved trauma of their own childhoods, their own histories. In recovery, I saw hundreds, if not thousands of people who were just like them. I began to understand. What I understood most clearly was the only way to help them was to first help myself. Second, help others. Hopefully one day soon they would be amongst the others.
Many people want to get clean. There’s a moment in their life when they have that “ah ha, maybe, just maybe…” moment, and if there is not an easy path forward in that moment then they are too often damned to repeat the same cycle, over and over again. I was fortunate in my “ah ha” moment to have a mom and dad who could direct me to a meeting. The meeting directed me to a psych hospital. A psych hospital that had “Hospitals & Institutions” panels with volunteers who came in and shared their personal stories with us. In between the hospital food, padded rooms, bed straps and white coats… I heard a message of hope. Again, those people directed me back to meetings.
It would take years of attending before I built up the resources and strength to face my deeper demons in therapy. I am among the fortunate few. Many, many people do not get that far. They don’t get to build up the psychological strength to support them to face those demons. Why? They don’t have the resources, structure or access.
It took many years of recovery to build the strength, both psychological and emotional, to return to school, to start therapy, to do things that “regular” people did in their lives. Through that work, and the kindness of strangers, I learned how to go to school and to get the education that helped make me a more effective healer. The child of high school drop outs, the son of a father who could not read and write, found himself putting one foot in front of another, graduating from college and going on to get a doctorate in clinical psychology. In grad school, I found many people who were just as stumped about how to help other addicts; within the first semesters of school I found myself being viewed as the resident expert on addiction — by fellow students and by the professors as well. Before my Masters even posted, I found myself lecturing for other professors to my peers, teaching them what I knew about addiction and recovery.
My experiences taught me the hard way how difficult it was for people to find help when they actually wanted it. I tried to do this as a clinical psychologist and realized the tools for finding help for people, especially people with little to no resources, were ineffective, insufficient and, in many cases, outright harmful: directing people to places that were not the right fit, brokering patients, sometimes even paying them to be in their facility.
Download the GET HELP App
I mention all of this because, ultimately, it drives one of the root causes of inadequate care for individuals with mental health and addiction challenges — the lack of coordination in the continuum of care and the rat-race runaround to accessing resources. When individuals are already struggling to find and address the root of a mental health problem, the constant barriers to getting the help they need when they need it can easily discourage people and knock them off their path to wellness. This is one of the founding principles behind GET HELP. Having walked that road as a youth in recovery and again as a Psychologist guiding people in recovery, it was clear that we needed a better way to coordinate resources and aide people on their journeys. The knowledge is there. The experience and tools to help people are there. But navigating that labyrinth can be a journey in of itself — one most are not lucky enough to find their way in like I was. Someone struggling shouldn’t have to be strong enough to figure it out on their own and jump through the hoops of siloed systems of care to arrive at a destination of well-being.
Something needed to be done. I knew enough about technology to get me into trouble, but not enough to get me out. I decided to create a tool for people to find available beds, and that became (or I should say consumed) my life’s work. GET HELP solves this by putting ALL the resources someone, or their caretaker, would need in one place. It interconnects agencies, shelters, health care professionals and other resources in a way I wish I had to help my parents when I was a kid — and in a way I continued to need as a professional adult. Technology can deliver all of this to people when they need it — and I’m proud that we’ve built it.
Today, using the knowledge I’ve gained over the last 25 years of trying to find help for people, I created GET HELP to connect treatment providers with the professionals trying to help, and with the public trying to find help for themselves or someone they love. It isn’t easy — nothing worth having ever is — but I’ve been fortunate to align with some amazing individuals who are also dedicated to creating a world where anyone, anywhere, can get the help they need, when they need and in the way they deserve.
Tomorrow, we will live in a world where information is democratized and where everyone, not only the most fortunate or privileged, can get effective treatment when they need it. Until that time, we will continue to work toward a world where luck has nothing to do with a person achieving recovery. This COVID-19 crisis taught us that the sharing and democratization of key health care and mental health elements needs to come sooner, not later. My team and I at GET HELP are proud to be at the forefront of pioneering that change. Managing this crisis, and everyone’s round the clock need not only for resources, but for data, beds, capacity and more, has shown us that not only is our platform timely, it works exactly as we intended, helping coordinate resources on both sides of the equation.
If you are interested in supporting the work we are doing, you can visit our website at www.gethelp.com; tell your treatment providers and other professionals about GET HELP® and find out how they can make their resources available on our platform so that the next 7 year old looking for treatment for his mother doesn’t need to wait 23 years to get his mother back. Let’s get and stay connected now. Together, we can.