Butterflies may be free in playwriting, but in the real world of substance-abuse treatment ? where addicts shed the burdens of dependence and depression to better navigate life?s highs and lows ? the cost is often considerable.
“Treatment here costs about $115 per day,” said Lorene Lake, executive director of Chrysalis House, a subsidized, 24-bed substance-abuse treatment facility for women, now in its 20th year.
“We treat the whole woman,” Lake said.
“It was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life,” Shirley Baskerville, a former resident and current program director for Chrysalis House, said of the intense rehabilitation program ? which now includes high school equivalency education ? that she went through in the 1990s.
Lake, who supervises a staff of 20, mostly female therapists, addiction counselors and administrative and direct care workers at the long-term care facility, explained that the average stay ? usually court- or protective services-ordered ? at the facility is six months. About 175 women have completed the program since 1986, and 65 percent of those who graduated in the last three years remain drug- and arrest-free.
And the facility, Lake noted, can also house up to 10 at-risk children of residents 10 years of age and under.
Chrysalis House?s annual budget is in the $1.6 million range, Lake said, and it is just completing a $300,000 expansion that will add another 10 beds. Program outpatients do pay a fee for services, but the total cost to residents and their children is defrayed through Anne Arundel County and Baltimore City subsidies, grants and private donations.
It becomes clear, however, that the estimated $20,000 Chrysalis House regimen of room, board and counseling is only part of the personal cost of an overall U.S. substance-abuse scourge that in 2005 claimed 8.1 percent of the over 12-years-old population ? an increase in illegal drug use of 0.2 percent over 2004.
As for alcohol abuse, the same U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration survey found that 22.7 percent of the over-12 population admitted to being binge drinkers, and that more women (17.2 percent) than men (15.9 percent), ages 12 to 17, used alcohol.
“I would recommend that any woman who is struggling with addiction consider Chrysalis House,” said 2002 graduate Marcel Martin of Glen Burnie. “It is a premier provider, and it?s [largely] a secret.”
