(INDIANAPOLIS) – A new addiction recovery center is opening on Indy’s north side, aimed at a specific group of clients.
The Heart Rock Justus Family Recovery Center will serve mothers with young children and pregnant women who are just out of rehab. Residents will stay for up to two years, receiving personalized individual or group therapy to help them conquer their addictions, as well as assistance with job training and parenting skills.
Overdose Lifeline founder Justin Phillips says the facility has been in the works for five years while her group tried to line up the right property and the money to purchase and operate it. The project faced one last delay earlier this year over zoning, with some Meridian-Kessler residents objecting that the house would draw crime to the neighborhood.
Phillips argues any neighborhood already has residents fighting substance abuse issues — you just don’t know who they are. At Heart Rock, she says, residents will be in a structured environment that makes those issues less likely to surface.
Phillips says few transitional facilities specifically serve women. She says women with substance abuse problems have faced gender-specific traumas that men haven’t, and therapy sessions can be geared to those issues. And Ashley Dueti, who went through her own battle with substance abuse, says mothers can benefit from having their kids under the same roof. She says conquering addiction requires making it one’s top priority, and it can be challenging to balance the rest of life with the constant attention to meetings and counseling sessions to lay that foundation. When women don’t reunite with their families until after leaving recovery, she says, the sudden transition can be jarring.
Phillips lost her son to an overdose. Indiana’s seven-year-old “Aaron’s Law,” allowing anyone to get a prescription for the anti-overdose drug naloxone, is named for him. Phillips says she began looking for and collecting heart-shaped rocks in his memory. When Overdose Lifeline was trying to come up with a name for the facility, she says she found one at the back door of the new property, and Heart Rock became the name.
Overdose Lifeline cut the ribbon on the facility on Tuesday, and is working to staff up to open its doors in two weeks.
