When a teenager bravely speaks out about a major societal challenge that few people are addressing, the community needs to listen.
Hailey LeClair is just 14, but she has experienced far more than people triple her age. Growing up in the Old Town area, she described in a recent story how her home was overwhelmed by addiction.
In a piece that wove together reporting with Hailey’s own writing, she shared what it was like to have a mother go to jail on drug charges and to make a new life with new guardians.
She described anxiety that manifested in sharp pains in her chest, fear of abandonment, concern about her little sister, and, overall, frustration that people didn’t seem to understand what she was going through or how to help.
Hailey spoke publicly because she hoped someone would listen. We must all listen.
She is not alone in her experience. The opioid crisis is a major problem now, but its effects will continue to linger in the lives of Maine children.
Over the last few years alone, thousands of young people have experienced the devastation of losing parents to overdose or arrest, or having to find a new home because their parents could no longer care for them.
It’s widely known how childhood trauma affects development, and is a strong predictor of depression and suicide. Yet what is Maine doing to help children find their own support and healing?
According to people in the field, not much, if anything.
“I keep saying to everyone, ‘What are we doing to reach out to these families?’ but I do not get a lot of response, said Pat Kimball, a board member and former director at Wellspring, a Bangor-based treatment center for people with substance use disorders.
As Kimberly Johnson, director of the federal Center for Substance Abuse Treatment said, healing from trauma often requires love and support, feeling as if one belongs to a community and developing a sense that one’s experience can be used to better the lives of others.
Doing that work — using Hailey’s story as a catalyst — will take a dedicated community response to listen to teenagers and then devise a way forward around what they need and what will work for them.
The Bangor region in particular has done hard, important work on trying to ease the opiate epidemic, such as by developing prescriber protocols for opioids, distributing overdose-reversing Narcan for free, setting up a detox center, starting a Vivitrol pilot program at the jail, launching the Bangor Area Recovery Network, and more.
If any region can show the rest of the state how to listen to its youngest, it’s this one. As Hailey so articulately wrote, “Telling other people emotional things can be hard, but it can also be healing. At least, that’s my hope.”
It is up to adults to turn Hailey’s hope — to increase understanding of those affected by a loved one’s addiction — into reality.