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Kimani’s story*
Kimani* is a proud Aboriginal woman in her 30s who arrived at Binbi Yadubay Family Recovery with her young daughter. She was passionate about seeing her mental and physical health improve and her connections with family grow stronger. Kimani shared with her clinician that she had experienced significant trauma in her childhood, family and domestic violence as she entered relationships, and struggled to manage Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and ongoing anxiety. Kimani was also involved in a car accident years before which introduced challenges with chronic pain. Kimani’s hope for accessing treatment was to achieve abstinence from using methamphetamine and cannabis daily, while learning new coping strategies, goal setting, parenting support, and counselling to help her manage PTSD.
Kimani had some positive job opportunities ahead of her and knew that connecting with the Family Units would help her with employment too.
Kimani commenced treatment by completing First Step, an alcohol and other drug brief intervention program which skilled her in understanding her patterns and reason for use, and simple strategies to manage urges to use and how to set goals. Alongside her clinician and an identified support worker, Kimani developed a relapse prevention plan, completed the Parents Under Pressure program, participated in specialised Cognitive Processing Therapy sessions to help with PTSD, and gained skills in healthy living and social and emotional wellbeing.
It was also important to Kimani to visit sites around Rockhampton that were significant to her culture and family; a goal that would be achieved with one of the program’s identified support staff.
On completion of the program and into aftercare, Kimani’s outcome measure results showed a clinically significant drop in depression and anxiety, with her assessment scores being reduced from the severe to mild range. Kimani had achieved and maintained abstinence, no longer reported suicidal ideation and scored her Quality of Life from a 5/10 at baseline to a 10/10 on treatment completion. Finally, on her client feedback she recorded that she was “Extremely satisfied” with her experience with Lives Lived Well.
*Name has been changed to protect client’s privacy. The image used is a stock image of a person for illustrative purposes only and does not, expressly, or implied, portray a person with drug, alcohol or mental health problems.
