As outreach workers, Lea-lah Manson and Lance Point work with people who have likely experienced brain injuries on top of dealing with the effects of homelessness and addiction.
Manson says there can be a tendency for society not to look at those who have experienced brain injuries as people.
“We don’t see people who have brain injuries as someone, we see them as a symptom of what they do, how they act out, and that’s not okay,” she said.
Point says that if someone is experiencing addiction as well as brain injury, the latter is often ignored.
“You get looked at as an addict. So then you don’t get to deal with the brain injury side of it,” he said.
Manson and Point recently participated in a conference as part of the BC Consensus on Brain Injury project.
“The message that I wanted to bring there was the effects of the homelessness, and addiction and brain injury all together as one,” Point said.
“I’ve spent many, many years out there in addiction, and I think that all of my associates out there have had overdoses and don’t know how to get out of that cycle.”
“It’s so hard to find a plan to get out of it once you get involved in prisons or in probation. It took me a good couple decades to figure out how to get help, how to ask for help, how to see people that were trying to help me for who they were.”
Point says he’d like to see more education for who may have experienced brain injuries.
“I didn’t even understand what brain injury was coming out of addiction,” he said.
“After you come out of an [overdose], you wake up and you’re standing around and you got five ambulance workers, fire workers, and you wake up, you don’t know what’s going on and you’re standing there and you just start looking for your stuff and then there’s one of those feelings that, you know, you want to run because you don’t realize they’re trying to help you, right?”
“I always woke up scared and stuff, so I’d always take off from that moment, not get checked out afterwards, not realizing what actually happened to my body, not until years later.”
Point says he feels like he’s come full circle.
“I’ve been here as an employee now for a year as an outreach worker and I can look back at those moments in my life,” he said. “To see the person that was trying to help me then, and who I became, keeps pushing me forward to help.”
Point, Manson, and Sandy Shultz, director of the Centre for Trauma and Mental Health Research at Vancouver Island University spoke with People First Radio on part two of a focus on brain injury.
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