MiraVista’s Opioid Treatment Program Launches Peer-led Recovery Group
HOLYOKE — Life in Recovery, a new, peer-led support group for clients of MiraVista Behavioral Health Center’s Opioid Treatment Program (OTP), will launch at MiraVista Behavioral Health Center this fall.
Together with a master’s-level clinician, the group will be led by Crystal Grzelak, who has shared her recovery experience at MiraVista, including in a video about OTP on the hospital’s website, in recent years. Click here to view the video.
“The integration of individuals in recovery into substance-use treatment programs as peer-to-peer support has been shown to help sustain recovery,” said Kimberley Lee, chief of Creative Strategy and Development at MiraVista. “It allows individuals in long-term recovery to share their lived experience to help others, especially those early in recovery, build confidence in navigating their own path of recovery.”
Life in Recovery provides a space to share experiences of those in recovery, talk about challenges, and exchange ideas and practices to support and help its members. Participants will explore ways to overcome difficult situations and learn to experience all that life has to offer without substances. Through conversation, arts and crafts, and other activities, while building friendships, the group’s focus is to prevent the feeling of being alone in recovery.
OTP provides medication-assisted treatment with methadone through its clinic and counseling for the medical condition of opioid-use disorder in those ages 18 and older, and is part of the psychiatric hospital’s addiction-treatment services.
“I never expected this was the path my life was going to take,” Grzelak said of her own use of substances. “When you first start doing these things, you think it is just a good time or makes you feel better. You don’t expect this is actually going to make you very, very sick. I started the clinic because I didn’t want to be sick anymore.”
She has said this eventually turned into “enjoying life and wanting to be clean” and has described OTP’s clinicians as listeners who “nudge you in the right direction without telling you what to do” and its peer-support groups as gatherings where members “can learn from each other.”