Sally, 28 years old: I grew up in the inner city. We were real poor because my father was an alcoholic, OK, and he was a gambler and he didn’t work. My father was very strict. Very. I couldn’t even think for myself. I couldn’t do anything. Most of the time I sat in a chair all day. I was very angry with my mother for staying with him. I hated her then. Then she got a divorce and we moved to a nicer part of town. I was 13. All of a sudden, I felt free. So I started drinking.
Sally is a former patient in the Women’s Chemical Dependence Program at Chicago’s Cuneo Memorial Hospital. (All patients’ names in this story have been changed.) Established in 1984, the program is different because it’s not for men. There are many for-women-only residences, halfway houses for instance, where women with drug dependency problems can go after detoxification. But hospital programs, usually an addicted person’s first stop on the long road to recovery, are almost all coed. A nationwide marketing study Cuneo conducted in the fall of ’86 came up with just a handful of hospital-based programs for women only, and Cuneo had the only one in Illinois.
A second justification for a female-only program is economic, and turns on the fact that women are more likely than men to be concerned about their health. Barbara Runyen, chief operating officer at Cuneo, says her predecessor, Sister Antonio, established the program primarily to fill a market niche. She thought it would be a strong revenue producer for the hospital, and she was right.
Even so, more men than women come forward for treatment. Men are more likely to have jobs, and therefore health insurance, and to be free of child-care responsibilities; and men still feel less of a stigma than women feel being addicts. Which is why “traditional coed programs are usually 70 to 80 percent male,” says Kelly. “The women are really outnumbered and they don’t feel comfortable.
Sally: I was in treatment programs with men, and it didn’t bother me at first. All my friends were men. I was never around women. I knew what to expect out of men, but I was afraid of women. You can con a man about your feelings a lot more than you can con a woman. Because men don’t care.
I think a lot of women have a lot of problems with sexual stuff, or abuse, or what have you, and they cannot talk when men are there because men are who they’ve been abused by.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“I grew up in New York City in a very nice Jewish world. The only time I ever saw people get high was at a wedding. So I was absolutely entranced by these people who didn’t know when to stop and who got themselves into such serious problems that they were in state hospitals. You can or cannot make anything out of the fact that three years ago my brother died of the end-product diseases of alcoholism. Larry and I were at different ends of the business. He was the victim and I was the investigator.
