Jamie Hairston is done sugarcoating. A former therapist and Army veteran, she’s not here to slap a polished narrative on addiction or healing. She’s here to talk about what happens when the system fails you, and what comes next.
“Addiction can affect anyone from anywhere, anytime, even if it is not you directly, it can affect you if someone around you is struggling, and this is the same with mental health issues,” she says. “You can be living with or working with someone who has either of these conditions and not even know it.”
Hairston knows this not from theory, but from experience. By 24, she was a mother of three, addicted to crystal meth, and suicidal. A forced rehab stay became the start of a reckoning, one that was anything but clean or linear.
“I have relapsed a few times during my recovery. Instead of beating myself up about it, I dust myself off and keep going. Recovery is not linear and people die daily from relapse or consistent use.”
She’s lived through what she calls the “messy middle,” and she’s not afraid to name the flaws of the very systems designed to save people like her.
“Shame and stigma are not it. Prison is not it. Recycling people constantly through 90 treatment programs is not it. Effective treatment requires more than 90 days for most people.”
Working in prison systems and with children in protective services only deepened her disillusionment. “In theory, all of this should work synergistically to help rehabilitate and unite families, but in real life it does the complete opposite.”
She describes correctional officers who “see inmates as trash,” and the way families of incarcerated people are punished alongside them. “You may have more freedom than them but if you are a kid whose dad or mom is in prison, you miss out on a lot.”
For Hairston, the breaking point came when she realized the work she was doing within the system could only go so far, and often at the cost of her own authenticity.
“I could not share my story… and I wouldn’t want to even if I could,” she explains. “Everyone has a different journey that led them to addiction in the first place and everyone will have a different journey to recovery. I felt like closing off that part of me kept me from being my authentic self.”
She left formal counseling not to abandon healing, but to speak more freely about the structures that keep people stuck. And she didn’t hold back.
“Medicaid is horribly abused by the mental health and addiction field, and I don’t care whose feelings I hurt with that. It has created a revolving door where we aren’t solution-oriented; we are money-oriented.”
She witnessed billing quotas, pressure to game the system, and nonprofit organizations that excluded the middle class. “Patients should be more important than money,” she says.
Hairston now advocates for integrating mental health into the broader healthcare system and questions why care is still determined by coverage. “Mental health affects your health and your health affects your mental health.”
But her vision goes deeper than just structural reform. For her, healing starts with dignity.
“When we see people for their worst actions or at their worst and nothing else, we have dehumanized them,” she says. “You are only meeting some people in the middle of their story… I have come a long way, and I never would have pictured myself having done half of the things I have accomplished.”
Still, she doesn’t let herself — or others — off the hook.
“You can have compassion, but accountability is important. When I blew up my life, I had a bitter pill to swallow, but I did it… I had to accept that nobody got me into that mess but me.”
She sees the lie at the center of most addiction narratives: that people simply choose it. “That may be the case for some, but let’s look at the late 90s and early 2000s pain clinics,” she says, pointing to overprescription and withdrawal mismanagement. “We have also learned since that drug and its producer came under fire, that it was literally designed to keep people addicted.”
Her own father was caught in that trap. “There was really no change to quality of life once there was a tolerance built,” she remembers. “It hurt when he passed but at least he wasn’t in pain anymore.”
Today, Hairston uses writing, fiction and nonfiction, to tell deeper truths.
“Sometimes my timelines are off, sometimes the way I remember something isn’t the same way someone else remembers it,” she says. “It just made it easier to share my story, but also be creative with events and timelines that would make the story flow a little bit smoother.”
She doesn’t claim to have all the answers. She’s not a brand. She’s not a guru. “My family and my life is dysfunctional,” she says plainly. “There is nothing anyone can do or say that can make me feel worse than I have already experienced.”
But there is hope. Not because everything is fixed, but because people are finally talking.
“The fact that mental health and addiction are starting to flow into more conversations and it’s not always as negative as it was like when I was a kid,” to her is a sign of progress.
And if she could say one thing to the version of herself still trapped at rock bottom?
“Stop telling yourself you aren’t strong enough to overcome what you have been through. You are capable of being so much more you just need to heal so you can see it for yourself.”
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