Nancy Labov, RN, CADC. Photos courtesy of Nancy Labov.
A nurse speaks from experience.
In nursing school, Nancy Labov felt a kinship with the patients she encountered during a rotation on a rehabilitation unit. She realized that she wanted to spend her career caring for patients like them. Their struggles with addiction struck a chord: alcoholism ran in her family, and she, too, had a substance abuse problem, though she was in denial about it at the time.
In her mid-20s, Labov got sober; she has maintained her sobriety ever since. She’s also persisted in her mission to help people recover from addiction. As an RN and a certified alcohol and drug counselor, she has spent the past three decades working on rehab and detox units across the country.
Labov is also the founder of Alumni in Recovery (AIR)—a nonprofit through which young adults in recovery give talks at schools in the communities they grew up in. As she discusses in the July Profile in AJN, “Helping Students See the Realities of Addiction and Recovery,” the New Jersey-based volunteer organization fights stigma by opening a dialogue about addiction and showing teens a young, local, and relatable face of recovery.
A peer-to-peer approach is key.
“How do we reach [students about addiction]? It’s easy. Just open the doors to somebody who has walked in their shoes.”
AIR members speak to a high school health class in Lodi, New Jersey.
As an active member of the recovery community, as well as a local parent and ambulance corps volunteer, Labov was able to bridge her many connections to get AIR up and running. And she knew many young adults who were eager to share their stories of addiction and recovery.
Five years after its inception, the group has more than 50 active speakers and has won the approval of schools, law enforcement, parents—and students. The key is that AIR speakers don’t lecture; they are careful to present their stories as examples of the fact that addiction doesn’t discriminate.
As schools grapple with how to warn students about the dangers of opioids, Labov says that the peer-to-peer approach is a useful way to engage them about a topic that they may otherwise tune out.
A scaleable model that can be implemented anywhere.
Labov points out that AIR’s straightforward framework can be implemented anywhere.
“We created a model for any community to take and do the same. . . . It gives us an opportunity to empower these young people in recovery—to give them a platform, because they have the ability to change things.”
For more information on the AIR program, see www.alumniinrecovery.org.
I’m a nurse in recovery with 33 months clean from opiate addiction. I live in a small town in MS that holds a few AA , NA, Al-Anon meetings during the week. I have found that rural areas like mine are lacking the funding and informational resources used to educate our high school, college students, health care personnel, and the community as a whole on the dangers of drug addiction, it’s consequences, and the signs/symptoms, and interventions. Also information on how it affects our community, our youth, our health care professionals and those things we can do to help those who are suffering. There are no centers just for nurses and none that are open after hours just incase someone needed a prompt relapse prevention plan, and/or peer support personnel that will help one in recovery stay in recovery. I’d love to be able to someday make this happen and give back and be of service to the recovery/ addiction community.
I have found that our line of work can stress the emotional limits that we can tolerate and I can truly respect what this nurse has chosen to do. Not only did she overcome her own issues but she used her past and redirected that success to help others find their way. Substance abuse is a common problem with healthcare workers and many have not found other ways to combat the difficult situations they find at work. Many of the situations in the nursing field are often too much for nurses to deal with emotionally and our coping mechanisms fail, possibly leading one down this path. The realization of this fact along with this womans (and many others) programs can help us to live healthy lives and make us aware of how we maintain our emotional stability in light of horrible circumstances. I have great respect for this woman as she not only has faced and admitted to her personal issues, but she allowed her past to empower her to shine bright for others in the very dark path we can find ourselves in having chosen this profession..