it s helped turn his life around and there s no going back. if you did have a slip, would one slip be a catastrophe? yeah. 0nce slip would kill me. seriously? seriously. genuinely, seriously, one slip would kill me, because i would feel like there would be no going back. broken promises again, this is the thing i have tried to understand with the academy about finding your values, your core values. to me that s scary, because you re setting your own bar so high, you re incredibly tough on yourself. yeah, you need to be, you need to be disciplined. and if i m not a disciplined i ll fall. at birkenhead, mike s not the only one who s been struggling. just across the mersey from liverpool, this place took the full force of the 19805 recession, as the shipyards failed and unemployment rose and heroin and other drugs took hold.
birkenhead is a deprived area. the sort of place we know can be especially vulnerable to drug and alcohol problems. but this is a community which is fighting back. and here in birkenhead they ve come up with this concept of a recovery village. what is that? a recovery village? there are already loads of different services here working to help people struggling with addiction, but now they re working together in much closer cooperation so the rehab hub, the recovery cafe down here, and the place where groups meet for mutual support round the corner, they re all working on really close co ordination to get people off the drink and off the drugs. it is organisations coming together as a collective of the wirral to work with a kind of shared goal.
the worst figures ever recorded. what about your recovery, mike? so recovery for me, as you know, is vital. sobriety is the first thing i think of every morning. still? still. that doesn t change? never will change, that. it s the end of may now and i m catching up with mike again, outside the recovery centre. this is where i used to drink. that place is the devil the devil. honestly? honestly. it can be like this everyone for coming out of addiction. temptation can feel ever present. for mike, it s just across the road, birkenhead s bars and pubs and nightclubs just steps away. it depends on what side of the street you want to be on, doesn t it? when you look over there is there any temptation? no, no. it s just disgust, more than anything. really? really.
perhaps most importantly, it shows others caught in the vortex of the drugs or the drink, that things can change. that there can be life after addiction. i am extremely happy, i m not depressed. there are things that drugs and alcohol stripped me of but there is a lot of things now that i am rebuilding. you can follow more of my year in birkenhead next weekend on the bbc news channel as i discover the toxic link between addiction and mental health. and an extended version is also available from today on the bbc iplayer addiction: the road to recovery. if you ve been affected by any of the issues in this film, you can get advice and support at bbc.co.uk/actionline.
about the recovery village here. this is our cafe. is this your cafe? yeah! and she has asked to come and see it. pleased to meet you. you are very welcome! thank you! this place is being called - the beating heart of the recovery community of birkenhead. she has written the latest major report on addiction and recovery services in england. there are very good areas of practice but what i found was a broken service. i didn t find good, ifound bad. she wants improvements a morejoined up approach. how many people you take it once? as many as you can fit in the door. we don t have a limit. a huge investment in specialist staff, maybe something like we are seeing here. we have been working with people who are often amongst the most marginalised in our communities, who come in broken and who leave healed.