To others, Martha Morrison was a star doctor. But inside, she hid a secret, an addiction to drugs and alcohol that lasted 17 years. Today, Morrison, 36, is director of an adolescent drug dependency program at Ridgeview Institute in Atlanta and author of an autobiography, ”White Rabbit: A Doctor`s Story of Her Addiction and Recovery” (Crown Publishers, $17.95). In this interview with Chicago writer Darlene Gavron Stevens, Morrison describes her ordeal and eventual recovery.
I was 12 when I started taking my mother`s Darvon in 1964. I had a headache and I knew she took them for her headaches, so I thought it would be Okay. The difference is I took four or five the very first time. It`s the story of my life. If one or two is good, then 10 or 20 is better.
Neither of my parents drank. I grew up in a small-town environment, in Fayetteville, Ark. My parents were very staunch southern Baptists; it was a loving and caring home.
My childhood memories are good, but the one thing that was traumatic was the death of my grandmother when I was 5. I remember crying on the way home
(from the funeral home), looking out the window of the car and making a vow that I was never going to cry again. That impacted me tremendously for the rest of my life.
My grandmother represented security and love to me. Most of all I remember sitting in her lap and feeling safe and secure and loved. Then it was gone. I think, in retrospect, I had the mistaken assumption (after her death) that if I never showed my feelings, I wouldn`t have to feel them.
There is a significant history of abuse in my family, but I wasn`t aware of it until way after treatment. Today we know the disease of addiction is genetically influenced. We know there are abnormal biological changes that take place in the body when these drugs are metabolized. It`s almost an allergic response.
I didn`t know any of that in 1964, when I took four pills right off the bat. It was three or four years later that I first injected a chemical
(preludin, a stimulant). I remembered saying to myself, ”This is my life, this is my love, I will do this drug till the day I die.”
I didn`t go out and advertise I was doing drugs. I went to great lengths to cover that up. I made good grades, I held the best jobs, I went to church and did all the things that were expected of me.
At some level I knew that using drugs was wrong, but as time went on, I became more sophisticated in rationalizing why it was okay for me. I thought I took the drugs differently. I didn`t kill anybody, I did well in school, so how could the drugs be a problem?
My addiction escalated very quickly. I drank at 13 and smoked dope at 14 and at 15 or 16 I was shooting speed. Shortly after that, I ran away from home, I was involved in drugstore burglaries, I had serum hepatitis (from using contaminated ”street” drugs), I had overdosed and I was living with a drug dealer.
I was high all the time. I took pills, I drank and smoked dope and went to class. High school studies were a piece of cake. My parents did everything they could. I had become very rebellious and isolated. My older brother didn`t know what was going on because he was married and living away.
When I was 17, my parents had me arrested and placed in a psychiatric facility. Over a period of a year, I was hospitalized three times for a total of four or five months. I decided I didn`t want to be locked up the rest of my life. I always wanted to be a doctor and I really wanted to go on (to medical school).
I decided not to stop taking drugs but to perform a little better on the outside. No one ever told me I was a drug addict; I was treated for paranoid schizophrenia. The doctors took care of me and did whatever they could.
I was released and lived at home until my parents found out I was doing drugs again. They tried to kick me out, which was the best thing they could have done. I convinced them it was all their fault, that they put so much pressure on me that I had to take drugs. So they let me live in a duplex they owned.
I married when I moved to go to medical school (at the University of Arkansas). We were both severely chemically dependent, but we didn`t realize it. We went to school and we took drugs. The marriage lasted three years.
I thought I knew enough to take drugs safely; I appeared to be coming out unscathed. I thought I knew it all. I figured I was the only one taking that quantity of drugs and succeeding in the highest profession possible. It boosted my image of being infallible. I taught substance-abuse courses. I felt sorry for people who couldn`t control their drug use the way I could.
My sophomore year in med school I overdosed on heroin and had a cardiac and respiratory arrest. When I came out of that, it was as if I had really beaten the big one. I continued to use for five or six more years after that. At end-stage addiction, about two years before I came into treatment in 1980, I was shoveling in dope like crazy and I couldn`t get an effect from it. Obviously I couldn`t smoke dope or drink before going to the hospital and I didn`t care to be caught in the bathroom shooting up. So I just ate handfuls of pills, narcotics and tranquilizers predominantly. I drank and smoked dope every night and every weekend. When I had a couple days off I`d shoot dope. I didn`t think alcohol was a drug. I`d have explosive bouts of nausea, vomiting or diarrhea, but it wasn`t for more than a day or so. I really didn`t miss a lot of work until the end.
I was burying my emotions. I think it`s one of the reasons doctors get into trouble. In medical school, especially if you`re a female, you are expected to always be sharp, bright and competitive and not show your feelings. If someone dies you can`t go blubbering around about it. You are the authority figure. Where are you going to deal with that or address how that impacts you? Nowhere. You are supposed to be God, in essence, and you end up thinking that yourself. You feel your colleagues expect it of you, your patients and the general public.
I lost a lot of weight and started to look haggard and emaciated. I was sent to a psychiatrist. He thought I was depressed and overworked. He tried to hospitalize me because he thought I was suicidal. My response was, ”Just try. I`m a well-known professional colleague.”
I was writing a lot of prescriptions. I began to know that eventually I was going to get caught, that I couldn`t keep this up. I knew I was dying. I didn`t care about losing my profession. I tried to quit my job by going to my residency director, and he said, ”No you can`t; you`re the best.”
My second marriage was falling apart, and we eventually divorced. It`s hard for me now to even dignify that relationship as a marriage. I had just come off one marriage with someone who was chemically dependent. I was looking for somebody to take care of me, and this man was 30 years older, very sophisticated, intelligent. I think I was looking for a father-figure basically just to kind of take care of me.
At the end (of the addiction) I started to have blackouts. I was losing chunks of time, and that scared me. I was a psychiatry resident and I really thought I was crazy.
My patients weren`t really at risk because I was in training and always had supervision. I was a psychiatrist and wasn`t operating on patients, and even at the end everybody continued to tell me how well I was doing. I was very compulsive. I would overcompensate at work for all the horror in my life. Finally, a team of doctors who intervened for me saved my life. I had nowhere to turn. Yet I still resisted them; I denied the problem. I drank while they were there to talk to me about entering a rehabilitation program. But I knew what they said was true. It took another two or three weeks before I sought treatment at Ridgeview Institute in Atlanta (in 1980).
I was there 36 hours when I attempted suicide. I had very severe, prolonged and protracted withdrawal. Those were the first 36 hours I had been drug-free in 17 years. I knew that I couldn`t live taking the drugs and I knew that I couldn`t live without them. I tried to hang myself. It really scared me when I came to. I felt devastated.
They locked me up for my own safety for a while before they brought me back to the alcohol- and drug-treatment part of the program. I was 29, but I was functioning on about the level of a 12-year-old with all the training and information of a physician. I was a problem for them and me.
Dr. G. Douglas Talbott (founder of the recovery program) took me under his wing. I think he was drawn to me because he`d never seen anybody go as far into an addiction and live. He believed in me and the recovery process enough to stick with me until I could believe it. It was crucial to me.
I was not an ideal patient. I`d have temper tantrums, parties in my room, anything to break the rules. I wanted to use every day, until I was clean about six months. I was as miserable sober as I had been when I was using.
I was progressing slowly. I left the hospital and went on the banks of the Chattahoochie River and I remember getting down on my knees. I felt the way I did before I put the rope around my neck, as if I was strangling. I remember praying, ”God, please let me get better or let me die.”
The moment I did that I felt the weight of the world lift off my shoulders, literally. The urge to use, the compulsion, was gone. It has never come back.
Once in a while I`ll think about drinking or taking a drug, but I don`t think very long about it. And I have never had that diehard compulsion since that time. I began to believe I could get better when I honestly admitted I was powerless and everything was totally unmanagable in my life. I came to believe there was something out there that could help even me.
That was the foundation of my recovery. The normal treatment time is four months and it took me more than twice as long.
Today I`m a lot more honest. I can listen to people and I can take what people tell me and utilize it in my life. I don`t think I know it all. The longer I stay sober the more I realize I don`t know. I feel I love myself some today and I loathed myself at the end of my addiction and for quite a while in early recovery. And I feel I have some of the security and the serenity and the love back that I recall losing when I was five and my grandmother died.
In other ways, I`m still your basic life-in-the-fast-lane person. I like living on the edge a little bit, but I`m a lot more cautious than I used to be. I was very cautious when I remarried (in 1984). My relationship (with Dr. Talbott`s son, Douglas Talbott, Jr., a computer-graphics illustrator) grew steadily for both of us. We gradually got to know each other and became better able to share with each other without having to depend on or possess each other.
I took a job (counseling) at Ridgeview right after completing treatment. I didn`t know for a long time if I could practice medicine again because of how impaired I was. The fear of losing my license didn`t matter because I was sober and alive. I practiced medicine for several years under a specific tightly controlled consent order by the Georgia state board of medical examiners. Today I have fully active, unrestricted licenses in Georgia and Arkansas.
At Talbott we have several organizations that provide inpatient and outpatient treatment for family members, adolescents, adults and health-care professionals. I develop programs for young people and their families. I love what I`m doing.
My message is that addiction is a treatable disease. I want people who are addicted or have a relative who is addicted to know there is hope for recovery. If I could get well, anybody can.
