The Right Medicine Office Manager and former client addresses underlying mental illness Christine Scott didn’t know she was bipolar until her most recent (and most successful) attempt at sobriety with Women Walking in Victory (WWIV).The diagnosis and treatment of the co-occurring disorder has made all the difference this time around. “Doctors tell me if it had been properly treated when I was a teenager, I maybe would have never started using,” she says. “But I don’t believe that.” Scott doesn’t dwell on the past, so it doesn’t really matter what could or should have been done. What matters is her place in life now, which she says is the best it’s ever been, and it couldn’t have happened any other way. She is able to care for her father, who narrowly avoided death from a heart attack in January, in a way she never could before, and her relationship with her 30-year- sober mother is stronger than ever. Living a double life Scott says she was the type of teenager who got straight A’s, who started working at 15 and carried a firm sense of responsibility. She was just following the doctor’s orders when she had her wisdom teeth removed and filled a prescription for Percocet. The opioid’s effects went beyond simply blocking the pain. “It was the best I’ve ever felt,” she says. “It made me feel like a better me.” She began taking it more than prescribed, and made it an everyday habit long after her stitches healed. One day after coming up short on a self-prescribed dose, the agony of withdrawal caught her by surprise. “I actually thought that prescription medicine wasn’t a drug,” she says. “As smart as I am, that’s how stupid I was.” Even though she didn’t perceive it as a drug, she led a double life. By all appearances, she was successful - she’d worked her way up the ranks of the banking industry and lived comfortably. She never got into trouble and even made it to church services and family functions, “but I always had a pocket full of pills,” she says. At 27, she was living with a man whose family was involved in large-scale pharmaceutical fraud, large enough for them to build a $900,000 house. It also enabled her to skyrocket her addiction, eventually forcing her to end her banking career. “I had a beautiful home and everything I could ever want,” she says, “but I was never more unhappy.”
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