A fitness instructor who beat addiction is leading efforts to highlight the issue throughout September, which is Recovery Month.

Michaele Parfitt-Smith is the founder of the EmPowerMe Bermuda — a “trauma-informed support group dedicated to empowering women through shared experience, guided healing and personal development”.

She told The Royal Gazette she aimed to “normalise” conversations on reducing the harm from substance abuse, as well as exploring the factors driving it — culminating in this year’s version of her regular fitness-based fundraisers.

Recovery Month was established in 1989 by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in the US.

Ms Parfitt-Smith said: “I’m doing my campaign for the full month, using EmPowerMe Bermuda’s social-media platforms.

“Recovery month comes with a theme that highlights unity — addiction is not ‘my’ problem; it’s an ‘us’ problem.”

This year’s theme is “Recovery is real: restoring every aspect of life”.

Ms Parfitt-Smith said: “I’ve created my own theme called ‘Facing the Facts’ and I’ll be exploring various subjects.

“The first is Aces, which are adverse childhood experiences. Next is CPTSD, which stands for complex post-traumatic stress disorder, and then I’ll be dealing with the issue of suicide.”

Ms Parfitt-Smith said that the legacies left by traumatic experiences, “especially when it comes to Bermuda, are a lot of the underlying root causes of addiction”.

She is now working to become a certified substance abuse counsellor, with local and international qualifications in the field.

“Addiction for some people has been described as an allergy of the brain,” she said. “There are some of us where it just might affect them differently.”

Ms Parfitt-Smith pointed to groundbreaking research by Stephanie Guthman of the Family Centre and Tara Hines and the Bermuda Health Council, aided by an extensive survey in 2019.

She said: “Together, they have researched the impact of these adverse childhood experiences in Bermuda.

“But I don’t feel people are really recognising its prevalence in all the things we are experiencing in our community right now — problems with education, homelessness, unemployment, people struggling with depression and gang violence.”

She added: “For the second week, we’re going to focus on harm reduction, which means taking a look at what we do and the Government does in a treatment sense, and what we can do as a community to lessen the harm to our healthcare system.

“Handing out clean needles, for example, which lessens the risk of diseases such as hepatitis — am I encouraging drug use by doing so? We’re going to talk about methadone, how it works in the community and trying to break the stigma around these conversations.”

Ms Parfitt-Smith said she was keen to talk about the availability of home drug-testing kits on the island, as well as the use of the anti-opioid drug Naloxone, commonly sold under the brand Narcan, to revive people in the grips of an overdose.

Narcan was the subject of a policy change in 2015 by the Bermuda Hospitals Board. It is now carried by emergency medical technicians and aboard ambulances.

The conversations during week three will be around the topic of attitudes to recreational drug abuse and ways of minimising its dangers, such as by avoiding combining dangerous substances.

Ms Parfitt-Smith said: “We’ve been told to ‘just say no to drugs’, but this is a new generation that wants to know why. We need to tell them, or at least normalise the conversation.”

She plans a virtual town hall meeting via Zoom for week four, with a panel of key speakers giving an overview of the topic as it stands today in Bermuda. Participants can join by e-mailing empowermebermuda@gmail.com.

Her fundraiser through Pilates exercises will be held at 10am in the Botanical Gardens on September 28, with details and $25 tickets available through the www.ptix.bm site.

EmPowerMe is a charity partner with the Women’s Resource Centre and programmes offered by both will benefit from funds raised.

Ms Parfitt-Smith said: “We are actively working towards health from trauma — we do not just get together and talk. It’s shown great growth this year; I’ve had my first cohort that have been working since May of this year.

“We are looking to attract more women who are ready to begin their journey to healing.”