Another independence day: fighting addiction at Verdun, Marina House

As Barbados pauses to reflect on nearly six decades of Independence, Verdun House and Marina House stand quietly in St John as “spaces of hope and healing” to remind the country that freedom is not only about nationhood, but about giving people the support they need to break free from addiction and reclaim their lives. Barbados TODAY’s Lourianne Graham visits the substance abuse charity to chat with a key fighter in a tough but rewarding independence struggle.

 

While Barbados celebrates 59 years of Independence, another symbol of hope – and freedom – celebrates 25 years.

 

Verdun House and Marina House are residential rehabilitation facilities tucked away in the deep eastern parish of St John.

 

Better known for its longer existence, Verdun House once housed both men and women, but for obvious reasons, the sexes needed to be separated.

 

In 2015, nearby Marina House was introduced as a more intimate and community-friendly temporary home for women.

 

Through the majority donation from the Maria Holder Memorial Trust, Marina House can house 17 females as they gain full support on their healing and rehabilitation journey.

 

Allison Gotip is the director of clinical services at Verdun and Marina House.

 

Gotip, who has been with the charity for ten years, says the goal is to help as many people affected by substance abuse as possible.

 

The two facilities provide gender-specific treatment because women with substance use disorders often have different and more severe issues, including high levels of trauma, she explains.

 

“Those women who do have substance use disorders tend … it tends to be more severe than men, and there’s always, most times, a lot of trauma there as well. Men obviously go through trauma, but we realised that the way that women process trauma looks slightly different than men.

 

“So imagine if we did have them combined and you have male and females together and we’re trying to process trauma, they may be looking at a male client and being triggered by just being in that environment, right, because of maybe things that they’ve gone through.”

 

While a lot of women seek help to deal with their substance abuse, more men opt for in-house treatment than their counterparts.

 

“It is the men who are willing to do the in-house, but I think it’s also, as, as I would have mentioned before… more men go into residential treatment, not even in Barbados, internationally, they have the same statistics showing,” Gotip adds. “It’s normally their role in society, they are able sometimes to disconnect from society in terms of it seems to be a bit more acceptable as opposed to a mother saying, well, I’m gonna leave my children and come into treatment for 90 days.”

 

But too often, family members make it difficult for women to take that time away to get the help they need to beat their addictions.

 

“We’ve had persons or family members who think, well, they’re just going on holiday, no, they need to work on themselves to make themselves well, so they turn up as a better version as a mother,” says Gotip.

 

The programme has an overall success rate, but the buy-in for treatment is often a short window, so the team has had to be creative.

 

“We’ve also diversified our treatment services, because there are persons who feel very overwhelmed coming into residential. So let’s normalise asking for help or normalise having a conversation.

 

“What we can do is to put you as an outpatient where you’re assigned a counsellor. It doesn’t seem so threatening, so intrusive. Let’s start having a conversation, right? Sometimes we do have persons who then transition from outpatient to residential or simply start their journey of healing through the outpatient services.”

 

Gotip says that due to their flexible programme, extensive research and adaptation to suit the Caribbean culture, the programme has welcomed regional and international people seeking help.

 

“We do a lot of evidence-based interventions. I think it’s so important for us in the Caribbean to have a voice in terms of putting things in a cultural context, because we can read the books about psychotherapy and creative arts. You try to sometimes translate that from the UK or the US into a Caribbean context, and it’s completely different. Persons aren’t understanding. So even things like when we do our trauma questionnaire and our trauma interview, we have to tweak it to the culture here, because persons are not going to understand certain scenarios that you put forward to them.”

 

Another key aspect is international accreditation, Gotip points out.

 

“I have so many qualified staff who are internationally and regionally qualified, and therefore we need to also look at continuing because we are internationally accredited, and even if persons do leave the Caribbean and go overseas, we’ve had persons who’ve gone to other rehab facilities and will still come to us, one, because we’re affordable, secondly, because they can see that the interventions that we use are credible; we look at confidentiality, and we’re so unique here because Barbados is so small, we have to look at confidentiality, what does that look like?

 

“Because imagine you have two persons together who used to use together, who may have been intimate together, it’s not like if you’re in the UK or America, where they can be in separate states, right? Therefore, we always have to manage that and also bring forward a nonjudgmental approach.”

 

A field of peppers from which pepper mash is provided to seasoning-making firms and a farm microbusiness mark an important feature of the charity: its self-sustainability.

 

“We have chickens, eggs, a vegetable farm,” says Gotip. “So we really look to be self-sustaining because it’s more than just saying, well, we’re a charity and just be complacent about that, but realising that it also helps the clients as well, because every single client has to go out on that farm.

 

“So we bring the food to them, and they’re able to see the benefits of actually being in the farm, assisting and helping and once again having that community and investing in something that they reap the reward from.”
Typically, the length of the rehabilitation programme is 90 days, with a high retention rate in women and even higher among men.

 

Beyond the 90-day stay, Gotip and her team focus on the next steps: where clients will live, whether they can work, and how they will rebuild relationships.
The aim, she stresses, is not just sobriety, but a better quality of life and a real chance at starting over.