Neale woman on RTÉ addiction documentary

Ciara Galvin

A woman from The Neale in south Mayo, who featured in a TV documentary about addiction last week, has said her treatment for alcohol addiction has cost approximately €150,000.
Valerie Farragher, from The Neale, appeared with members of her family on the RTÉ documentary ‘Living with an Addict’, talking about how her alcohol addiction had affected her family. Two of her five children also appeared in the documentary to speak about their mother’s addiction.
Galway hurler Davy Glennon also featured in the documentary speaking about his battle with gambling addiction.  
Valerie told The Mayo News that during her ten year battle with alcohol she got to a stage where she was drinking a litre of vodka a day sometimes.
Valerie has said that her ‘dual diagnosis’ is what helped her address her dependency on alcohol.
Dual diagnosis is the term used when a person suffers from both a substance abuse problem and another mental health issue such as depression or an anxiety disorder.
“You don’t wake up and go ‘I’ll drink a litre of vodka and destroy everything around me’,” said Valerie, who went on to explain that it was depression that led her to depend on alcohol.
Valerie has been a member of Alcoholics Anonymous for more than ten years now and though she thinks highly of the service and the work it does, she is critical that ‘dual diagnosis’ is not factored into recovery.
“The bill from our house and the state was about €150,000, I was given every treatment. Nobody ever said anything about harm reduction or dual diagnosis. People were saying ‘why can’t she stop drinking?’. My husband always said ‘there’s something [not alcohol dependency] wrong with her’, we were eleven years married before the drinking started,” she explained.
After her fourth child Valerie developed post natal depression and admits that after three years unable to identify what was wrong, she began drinking after a neighbour called over to her house for a drink.
“There was gin left in the wardrobe for years and a neighbour called over. I remember standing in the hall thinking ‘this is magic, I’ll have a few sips of this and I’ll get clothes done, floors washed and be in good form. That wears off though and you need more and more...I knew it wasn’t right what I was doing.”
Valerie said she didn’t know where to go to seek help and feared that if she went to her GP about her issues with alcohol, her children would be taken from her.
Valerie attended rehab on four separate occasions and attended regular AA meetings.
“I loved AA, met some great friends, but I shouldn’t have been sent there. I should have been treated for mental health first.”
After her last stint in rehab Valerie stayed sober for seven months, but said it was out of ‘pure fear’ she stayed away from alcohol.
“I allowed it to control me and it was inevitable I’d go back [drinking]. I turned into a raging psychopath. My husband had a full-time job, a house, five children and a farm, he needed to get things done,” said Valerie. Sober now for several years, Valerie wrote a book with her family entitled ‘Come back when you’re sober’ and has set up her own website, newchoices4her.com, a membership based site dedicated to helping women stop or control their binge drinking, eating and ‘all the head stuff that goes with it all’.  

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Living with an Addict is available to watch on RTÉ Player until November 23.