Epiphany fills need left by city cutback in addiction treatment

“Kimberly,” a graduate of Epiphany Center’s drug and alcohol recovery program in San Francisco, holds a photo of herself as a young fashion model in Paris as she poses outside the transitional living home where she moved April 12. (Photo by Christina Gray/Catholic San Francisco)
 
April 29, 2019
Christina Gray
 
San Francisco’s Epiphany Center, a legacy of the Daughters of Charity’s ministry to distressed women and children dating to the roots of post-Gold Rush San Francisco, is providing extra help to one group most in need today: Those addicted to drugs and alcohol.
 
Anticipating a cutback in city support for addiction treatment, the center has opened a transitional living home for women completing its residential drug and alcohol treatment program. The expanded program is designed to give the women more time to heal from their addictions as well as the traumas that may have led to them.
 
The home on Broderick Street opened last year to help residents more successfully transition to sober living in light of a city mandate limiting treatment time to 90 days, effective July 1.
 
Epiphany Center is among the drug and alcohol treatment programs in contract with the Department of Public Health that will be affected by the reduction, which the Daughter of Charity who leads the center sees as a threat to the long-term sobriety and stability of women in treatment and their families.
 
Those suffering from addiction face high risk of relapse, and the lack of affordable housing in San Francisco poses another obstacle to stability.
 
“Studies show that it takes more than nine months for sobriety to take hold,” Epiphany executive director Sister Betty Marie Dunkel, DC, told Catholic San Francisco April 17. “Without support, even women who have more sobriety than that can relapse.”
 
Sister Betty Marie has long experience treating those with addiction. In the 1970s, she ran Mount St. Joseph residential treatment center for adolescent girls, a ministry of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul in San Francisco.
 
The Daughters were among the pioneer religious orders responding to humanitarian needs in post-Gold Rush San Francisco, then distant and dangerous missionary territory. They arrived by steamer from Maryland in 1852, two dying of cholera on the journey through Panama. They set up an orphanage in what is now the Financial District. Ten years later, when bustling Market Street was no ideal place for children, they opened an orphanage for 300 orphans on Silver Avenue: Mount St. Joseph Infant Asylum. In 1921, the Daughters opened a hospital for unwed mothers.
 
The now-expanded outreach to addicted women and their families is another example of the Daughters responding to “the needs of the times,” Sister Betty Marie said.
 
The transitional living home can accommodate up to 12 women “graduates” of the structured treatment program Epiphany operates at its headquarters a few blocks away. Residents’ children 5 and under are welcome, too.
 
Epiphany’s priority population is homeless women, with or without children, who are IV drug users, said Suzi Desmond, the organization’s CEO. They find their way to Epiphany through the court system, child protective services or other treatment centers. Some even knock on the front door at 100 Masonic Ave.
 
Desmond said the city’s decision to reduce maximum treatment time to 90 days was “disheartening” to Epiphany staff. The center historically has offered treatment time based on a client’s needs.
 
“How long it takes to recover depends entirely upon the individual, the substance and the history of abuse,” she said.
 
Some women in the program started using drugs as young as 10, often introduced by family members. “So the addiction has really taken hold,” Desmond said.
 
At 90 days, “the brain hasn’t even begun to heal” from a longtime addiction and the underlying traumas that may have led to it, she said. Springing recovering women out into the world on their own too soon, she said, can lead to a repeated cycle of substance abuse, homelessness and trauma.
 
“It takes time in a safe environment where they don’t feel threatened, where they can have their needs met, relax, eat good food and heal over time,” Desmond said.
 
“Kimberly,” a 47-year-old mother of four from Atherton, moved into the house April 12, the day she completed all four levels of the Epiphany treatment program. She told Catholic San Francisco she found her first longtime sobriety at Epiphany after 27 years as an alcoholic and drug addict.
 
“When I first came here, I thought my life was over,” she said. “But that’s really changed now.”
 
She has a job and is making plans to attend UC Berkeley.
 
Once a fashion model in Paris, Kimberly went from heavy drinking to cocaine to methamphetamine to heroin. She drifted in and out of jail, lost custody of her four children, experienced intermittent homelessness and failed in 12 different treatment programs before finding her way to the Epiphany last fall.
 
“Now I feel like I can be somebody,” said Kimberly, who fought hard to win an appointment to Mayor London Breed’s methamphetamine task force.
 
“It didn’t occur to them to have an addict at the table,” she said. “I think I have some good ideas.”
 
Sharonda Davis, 25, sober now after eight months at Epiphany, has one level to complete before moving to transitional housing. She said she has learned that recovery “doesn’t really start until after treatment.”
 
“After all of these things that happened to me, my life was so dark before and my heart was really numb,” she said. The support she got at the Epiphany has “opened up my heart and made me feel what I’d not been feeling all those years.”
 
She is determined to become a nurse like her grandmother, who retired after many years at Laguna Honda Hospital.
 
“There is nothing in this world that can take my determination away now,” she said.
 
 
Epiphany Center opened a transitional living home in a Victorian on Broderick Street to provide extended treatment for those suffering from addiction, in anticipation of cutbacks in city support. (Courtesy photo)