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Vancouver’s recovery café is an ‘oasis in the desert’

The first in Canada, it’s a healing space for people recovering from substance use and more.
calencarswel
Calen Carswel says the recovery café ‘gives people in recovery a wider menu of options. It’s going to be a good thing for me.’

Calen Carswel has been in recovery nearly as long as he’s been alive.

The 61-year-old lost his  older sister, Eleanor, in a car accident when he was just four. The  absence of her love and emotional support, Carswel said, sent him  seeking comfort almost everywhere he could find.

Carswel says he turned to sugar and  television as a child, and then to alcohol, pornography and cocaine as a  young man living in Lillooet, Newfoundland and Vancouver. 

For a period of time he was homeless,  sleeping during the day in a storage unit near Pacific Station or in his  truck, and showering at Vancouver Community College hoping no one  noticed he wasn’t a student.

In 2001, he completed a  90-day residential treatment program that helped him stop using cocaine.  Ever since, Carswel has been searching for a path to recover from the  grief and manage his bipolar disorder diagnosis.

“It feels like a roller coaster,” said Carswel. “Every day is a bit different.”

Sometimes lately, though, his jolting  journey glides to a pause at the Recovery Café, run by the non-profit  Kettle Society. The first of its kind in Canada, the little hangout  opened in East Vancouver in September, offering a physical space for  people recovering from substance use, mental health crises, homelessness  and grief to gather and heal together.

“It’s like an oasis in a desert,” said  Carswel, who joined the program in mid-November. “It’s just what the  doctor ordered for me.”

The café already has 50 members from its pop-up launch at a temporary space in the Downtown Eastside earlier this year. 

Membership is free and the only expectation is to attend one of four weekly recovery circle discussions each week.

With a permanent space in East Vancouver  near Hastings and Clark that launched Friday, the café hopes to grow to  support more than 300 people in recovery and run two circles per day.

“There are so many pathways in recovery,  and we just want to be another option,” said café manager Damian Murphy  in an interview. “We hope to be a space where people can explore that  and learn from one another.”

Murphy, who has worked for the Kettle  Society for 13 years, says he’s seen the gaps between health care,  housing, substance use and mental health services widen and widen.

Even when people do wish to access help for  substance use or mental health issues, they often have few supports  available after they leave crisis care in a hospital, treatment centre  or detox facility, he said.

Recovery cafés aim to help ease these transitions and provide ongoing support to members after a crisis has subsided. The first one was founded in Seattle in 2003.

“It’s community-based support, it’s  non-clinical, it’s not threatening,” said Murphy, “which is important  especially because for a lot of folks dealing with mental illnesses,  there often isn’t a lot of trust with institutions.”

At the Vancouver location, members can get a  cup of coffee and a warm meal, participate in recovery circle  discussions with peers and take classes in photography and other  creative pursuits. There are phones and computers to use, and staff help  connect members to outside housing and health resources.

About 30 per cent of members  are Indigenous, Murphy said, and the café is aiming to add  Indigenous-specific programming in the near future.

Chad de Regt, a former nurse and now mental  health worker at the café, says sharing his passion for astrology with  members by teaching them to read their birth charts has been healing for  him, too.

De Regt was born in South Korea and adopted  by a Dutch couple living in Canada. He says he faced racism, religious  trauma and homophobia growing up that has stayed with him for many  years.

“Astrology is another way of knowing  yourself more deeply,” he said in an interview. “My classes and all our  other resources here, it’s about helping people accept who they are so  they can move forward.”

The program is not religious and doesn’t  require total abstinence. Members are asked to have abstained from drugs  and alcohol for 24 hours before they come in during opening hours  Monday to Friday.

Murphy hopes that the café will become a  model for similar spaces across Canada. “Vancouver is often the first,  but we don’t want to be the last,” he said.

Carswel used to drop in at the Kettle Society in the Downtown Eastside, where he first heard about the recovery café.

Now he makes the half-hour bus ride from  his home in Burnaby to the permanent location nearly every day to spend  time with fellow members as he rides the waves of complex grief he is  still navigating.

“It gives people in recovery a wider menu  of options,” he said. “It’s going to be a good thing for me, and for  Vancouver in general, especially this neighbourhood.”