Documentary filmsIn a new Netflix film, four men on the road to recovery talk about rehabilitation, hope and misconceptions
Sitting on leather couches at a West Virginia farm, a father of two reckons with terrible news about his three-year-old daughter, who he just learned had been molested while in foster care.
“I don’t know what to do,” says Jeff, who was at the farm to treat his opioid addiction.
The silence lingers until addiction counselor Craig Cohen carefully asks the four men, each a portrait of masculinity in camouflage caps and tattoos: “Are we just talking shit every day? Are we just having fun?”
Then, something quietly revolutionary occurs: the men consider Jeff’s options, his feelings, and share their own experiences with sexual assault and losing custody of their children. They are not swapping war stories but working through their own experiences and emotions to process an unfortunate reality without the help of drugs or alcohol.
It is one of several scenes in the new Netflix documentary Recovery Boys that depicts four men who could easily be classified as “tough guys” processing their emotions at the Jacob’s Ladder rehabilitation program.
They are there to treat their addiction to opioids such as heroin and prescription painkillers, which have been misused at such a high rate in the US that 115 people died each day in 2016 from opioid-related drug overdoses, according to the US health department.
Opioid abuse skyrocketed in the past 10 years, especially in the Appalachian region, which engulfs West Virginia. Its widespread abuse has led to a barrage of devastating news coverage and the Trump administration declared a federal public health emergency in response to the crisis.
Set in the middle of this crisis, the film provides an exploration of male emotions will be refreshing to anyone who has grown accustomed to staid representations within popular culture, as will the film’s focus on people in recovery instead of people suffering from addiction.
The film changes the narrative from destitute people injecting drugs in a run-down apartment block or crumbling rural shack and instead nestles recovering drug users among frolicking pigs and chickens, providing a much-needed antidote to the barrage of depressing stories about the country’s opioid crisis.
“Now that you’re not high, you come out and listen to all the birds,” Jeff says one morning at the farm. “When you’re high, you don’t focus on shit like that.”
For 18 months, the film follows men through treatment, as they grapple with feelings of not being loved, supported or in control.
Months after the shoot ended, 35-year-old Ryan spoke to the Guardian about the positive results the program had on his life.
Ryan, who was raised in North Virginia, said he grew up with people who used but did not embrace rehabilitation programs. But he was attracted to Jacob’s Ladder because it had non-traditional treatment offerings, such as eastern philosophy, meditation and yoga.
“I went through overdoses and car wrecks, and I was jailed a couple times but I didn’t want to give up,” Ryan said. “I had to find something. And it turned out it was Jacob’s Ladder.”
Jacob’s Ladder was founded by Dr Kevin Blankenship after the retired emergency room doctor was unable to find a long-term recovery program for his son, who is now clean and makes a brief appearance in the film.
Blankenship’s holistic, long-term residential facility incorporates meditation, music and art programming and farm work into the healing process.
Ryan said he is now part of what he described as the “huge community of recovery” in Morgantown, West Virginia. Opioid addiction and overdoses have wreaked havoc on the state, but the resilience and strength of people in recovery is fighting to get attention amid a barrage of depressing news stories.
Sharing this side of the story was a concerted decision by director Elaine McMillion Sheldon, who is from West Virginia. “I make this film not to victimize, pity or make excuses for individuals, but to uplift the stories of people who are actively trying to make change, no matter how big or small,” Sheldon said in a statement.
In telling the story of recovery, the film-makers also had to show that the glimmers of hope in recovery don’t come easily either.
Rush, 26, had been to rehabilitation facilities nine times without success before arriving at Jacob’s Ladder.
He said that at those facilities, even though he wanted to be sober, he would just try to get out as quickly as possible. “I know what people want to hear so it is really easy for me to skate through a program undetected,” he explains in the film.
But the Florida native saw something different at Jacob’s Ladder and tried harder than ever to interrupt patterns in his life and finally put an end to his drug use.
Rush said he was uncomfortable at first with the cameras, but that the film-makers quickly became a “part of the family” by doing yoga and eating meals with the men.
He said that he hoped that by participating in the film, he could send a message of hope and recovery to others suffering from addiction, and a message of understanding to those that don’t.
“My hope for this documentary is that it destigmatized the addict,” Rush said. “Everybody thinks of the guy under the bridge with the tattoos, the beard. We’re not just all bad people. We are good people inside.”
- Recovery Boys is streaming on Netflix from 29 June
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