Stigma, Grief and Love: a conversation with my mum

I’m sitting with my mum, Kim, ready to talk about my brother, Karl, who passed away 13 years ago this month. The ripple effects of his loss are still deeply felt across our family. His absence is a shadow that never quite lifts — especially around this time of year.

Karl’s struggle with drugs began when he turned 16. Heroin came into his life not long after, his addiction took hold frighteningly fast. Our house was chaotic — four sisters under one roof, and poor Karl stuck in the middle of it. He must’ve felt like he never had a moment's peace. I was only four years old when he started taking drugs.

My Mum often shares what it was like juggling the needs of a busy household with the daily crisis of supporting a child in addiction. Even now, when we drive around Swindon — where we lived back then — she points out spots where she used to drop him off to pick up drugs. She talks about how honest he was with her. Too honest, sometimes. He’d tell her everything, even the things she didn’t want to hear.

Karl battled addiction on and off for 11 years. He was never given the opportunity for residential treatment or community support and Karl died on April 21st, 2012.

During these years, my mum found support through Release, a criminal justice charity. She often recalls something Colin, a worker there, once told her: ‘the average life expectancy of someone in active addiction is around 11 years’. When Karl reached that 11-year mark, my mum says she felt an odd sense of relief — like maybe he had escaped the fate. But then, we lost him.

I now work for Phoenix Futures, which has fortunately led me to work on the Anti-Stigma Network. So, I ask Mum: what was it like being the mother of someone who used drugs and alcohol — in a society that often doesn’t understand?

She tells me about the stigma she felt, how people would talk about her and our family. How others assumed she’d failed as a parent — because if she hadn’t, ‘how could her son have ended up using drugs?’

My mum went beyond to try and help him, like most mothers. We moved to a tiny town, hoping to escape the cloud of judgment that had formed around us. I recall my sister telling me of being in school and her peers knowing every gory detail of our ‘heroin addict’ brother as it was plastered in the papers.

My mum tells me about the times she’d go with Karl to the pharmacy for his methadone. If other customers were around, he’d be told to wait and then taken into a side room, as though his presence was something shameful. That blue prescription that lets everyone know why he’s in there, a target for judgement. After he moved out, he started going to a different pharmacy. The new pharmacist was kind which seemed so rare. She even asked if he wanted the methodone without fluroide as he was paranoid about his teeth.

I asked my mum: Did you experience stigma just for being his mum?
“Yes,” she said, “even from the start — that first GP appointment, we arrived and his friend’s mum was the receptionist, it became gossip. Close family started taking a sidestep, they were distancing themselves because of what he was going through and the shame that comes along with supporting someone in addiction. It was isolating beyond words, I was living a double life.”

Karl carried that stigma too. Mum told me how, when he left prison and stopped using, he was paranoid, he felt shame for what he had been through because nobody understood. He didn’t want any of us — his sisters — to ever go down the same path. He stopped seeing himself the way we did.

My mum recalled going to a housing appointment with him and hearing, “If you’re a drug addict you get everything.”

Even after he died, the stigma didn’t stop. “When I tell people my son died,” Mum says, “they ask what happened. I tell them — but I think, he wasn’t in a car accident. He wasn’t a soldier at war. He was a young man who used drugs. And I’ve laid myself open to judgment because of the society we live in. But I won’t lie about him.”

That stigma didn’t just follow Karl. It followed all of us. And it still does. Mum says, “Society sees people who use drugs as the lowest of the low. That they don’t deserve help, or dignity.”

These are questions we don’t ask often enough — about the people who love someone through addiction. The ones who sit in waiting rooms and endure the looks and whispers, and still hold out hope, trying to support someone in active addiction is hard enough alongside the shame brought on by a society that reads stigmatising headlines.

As I talk to my mum about Karl, we reflect not only on what he went through, but how the world around him — and around us — responded. Karl’s name frequented the local paper and he was offered little dignity, just a label to erase his identity. This dehumanising language tells the public this person is not worth care or complexity

This one from 2005. The headline reads: “Last chance is given to addict.” And right underneath it, my brother is described as a “young thug.” Just those two words — “addict” and “thug” — flattened his entire life, struggles, and identity into something disposable. Something shameful.

There was no context. No mention of the kindness he showed to his family and his soft caring nature, the honesty with which he faced our mum, or the resilience it took to keep trying. Just stigma, dressed up as journalism.

And it didn’t stop with the press. One comment still sticks with us: “Some people do a hell of a lot less and go to jail… I still think it's disgusting.” Another: “The only way to get off drugs is to send people to prison.” As if addiction is a crime to be punished, rather than a health condition to be treated. As if prison is a substitute for compassion.

This language didn't just affect how strangers saw Karl. It shaped how he saw himself.  And for us — his family — it meant living in a town where people whispered, judged, and assumed. Where my mum was blamed. Where love was never enough to prove we were trying.

Stigma didn’t just follow Karl, it wrapped itself around all of us.

Fern Telfer.