“I fight to get my son out of drugs”

For 10 years, Roselyne Febvre has been struggling to snatch Arthur, her 29 -year -old son, in the infernal addiction cycle. From this hard fight was born a book: The heartbeat of the hummingbird.

It is a story of awareness as much as a love letter … We have read it, plunge it too.

“Arthur was 19 years old and the heart broken by a breakup. The end of a stormy relationship with her girlfriend, who herself drugged. This does not explain everything, but certainly contributed to the disaster. Until then, he was content to smoke some joints, like a number of teenagers. It was a soft and charming boy. Funny and of a sensitivity on the edge, who confined Rosely. Febvre. His dream? Integrate a film school. He had just been admitted after the creation of a short film.

The night when everything changed

“There was that night when everything changed, when he consumed hallucinogenic mushrooms for the first time. He had bought them on the internet, as we would do with a sweater or a book. And they plunged him into a high-winged puff. He disappeared for long hours, leaving his apartment completely returned. He tore his clothes, scratched the whole body, struck the head against the body Walls, insulted the police who were trying to calm him down and ended up in a sobering up cell. but the crisis was not calmed down. Remaining incoherent and violent, he was transferred to a psychiatric hospitalin a closed service. We were in 2015. For us, relatives, it was the shock and then the start of the collapse. And from the descent into hell, which is still extended today. ”

Questions fuse, the answers are lacking

“I hoped an outing after a few hours, perhaps 2 or 3 days. It took weeks for him to reconnect with the real world and then find the strength to reintegrate it. I was waiting for a diagnosis that would allow me to understand. But it remained appallingly blurred. The drugs followed one another and combined, neuroleptics, antipsychotics, valium, calming … Aggressiveness to plunge it into an amorphous state.

Then came the trouble and the remorse, the pardons and the torrents of tears. During this period, I tried to survive apnea, with the constant impression of drowning. I searched in my memories in search of answers. Seeking a logic and a meaning behind his pain and the drug taking, he who came from a family from which she was completely absent. Was it due to the divorce of his father and I, when he was 6 years old? To my very long days, as a political journalist on a large French channel? The difficulty in finding your place, getting along with your sister Camille, 5 years older than him? To his need for revolt? The question marks remained. ”

A new start

Arthur ended up getting better, but he was not healed. “The doctors oriented him towards a private clinic to regain strength. After a while, as the delusional puff had calmed herself, he was finally able to go out, while remaining under medication treatment. I wanted to believe in a single episode, a course accident – that we would gradually leave behind us – and a new start. I had returned the keys to his old apartment and had found another. Life has resumed, his, mine.

But even if he was going well, I was on alert. Everything contradicted his attempts to reassure me. Its ever more numerous silences, its increasingly agitated attitude And euphoric, its weight loss and its insomnia, symptoms that reminded me with anxiety the period of depression which had preceded this first crisis. ”

And relapses

“Then the day after Christmas Eve 2016, he called me, the pasty voice, pronouncing incoherent words. I rushed to find him and I took him urgently to a psychiatrist. On the road, he admitted to having taken cocaine, LSD, MDMA, synthetic drugs. Having stolen my watch and the business of his grandfather to sell them. was the return of verbal violence, self -destruction, then of the hospital.

My son, my obsession

“Since then, nothing seems to be able to stop craving, this irrepressible need for drugs, this addiction which supplants everything else. With him, I discovered the devourer, the other part of my son, The disease that takes possession of him during crises, leads him to fly, liemanipulate. To be threatened and be cruel if we refuse to comply with your requests. It is a form of terrifying madness. Over the years, different names have been given to him by doctors: decompensation, bipolarity, depression, ADHD, schizophrenia, until finally a real diagnosis, that of manic phases. But there is no magic wand to cure dependence no more than the terrible suffering of being powerless to help it.

As a mom, a parent, you are ready to do anything to save your child. Even when he does not realize the severity of his condition. Even when he is not ready to fight fully to get out of it. And even if it consumes you. It ends up becoming a form of codependence, where your child acts as a drug. The fear that something happens to him is so strong that we live in panic, with a single obsession, that of watching over him. And the need for him, as we would have to have his dose. To know if he is fine, if he has consumed, if he has taken his medication, if he must be taken to the hospital.

This is what I have experienced for years. Until finally understands that I had to stop putting my finger in the gear. No longer give money, no longer be an absolute recourse. But it is terrible, because it goes against the visceral need that I have to protect it. Without this part of distance, I would also have sunk. Even if it does not prevent sorrow or love, still as strong. ”

Breaking the drug taboo

“It will be 10 years since this first time. 10 years of combat, periods of truce and relapses. And in the midst of this tide which comes back at times to overwhelm everything, the writing of a book, to tell its story, ours. A way of keeping this link with it, in these moments when it was inaccessible. To say too, how much you can feel, without knowing, Rare doctors and nurses, brighter than the others, who speak to you and reassure you.

I also needed to break this taboo that always surrounds drugs, this feeling of shame that sticks to the body of those who take it and also contaminate their loved ones. Today, Arthur is not cured. The devourer is still there. I hung on with all my strength to the hope of seeing him heal. This hope scares me because it nourishes my irrepressible thirst to save it. But after the moments of overwhelmingly, he always ends up resurfacing. He is inseparable from love, inseparable from the mom that I am. And who continues to watch. ”

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