A Sober House for Students

André Chung for The Chronicle

Sophie Pyne grew up in Hong Kong, the daughter of a Chinese mother and a father from England. She had struggled with addiction for most of her adolescence and had been treated at facilities in various countries.

At the University of California at Santa Barbara, she relapsed after three years’ sobriety. She transferred to the University of Southern California in 2013 for her junior year, lived off campus with a roommate she didn’t know, and had a hard time, especially as an international student, transitioning to a new college. “All I wanted to do was isolate, numb those feelings, and skate through,” she recalls.

“A lot of my life,” she says, “I was a very independent person on the surface, able to get the good grades, able to paint that picture on the outside that everything was going OK.”

But in April 2014, about a month before finals, she started falling apart academically and personally. A friend contacted her parents, her mom flew to Los Angeles, and she got Pyne involved with the Haven at College, a private recovery center that acts as a partner with colleges and universities, in only its second year on the USC campus. The Haven’s house manager at the time became Pyne’s sober companion and got her through finals. Pyne attended a treatment center, and then in July of that year entered the Haven’s recovery residence program.

She hated it. She needed it.

“Every 30 days I told them I was going to leave,” she remembers. “The whole thought of being in sober living was awful to me. What really changed for me was there were young people who knew what I was going through, who also had the same stressors as any college student does, and who were also battling this disease.”

She had to face the university’s yearlong disciplinary suspension for poor academic performance as well as alcohol and drug infractions. Despite that, senior year was her best in college. And she and her parents were relieved that she was living in a safe place.

A lot of college students need the guidance and safety that Sophie Pyne did, and the Haven has grown accordingly. New programs opening this fall at Tufts University and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County are the eighth and ninth Haven facilities, with another, at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, in the works for 2020.

Meanwhile, the company is enhancing existing centers. Its Miami University facility in Ohio has offered outpatient mental-health treatment not just for addiction but also for anxiety, depression, and other diagnoses, and the Haven will soon offer those services at the University of Southern California and elsewhere. Demand for those additional services has been high, says Sharon Weber, a Haven co-founder, because three-quarters of people being treated for addiction suffer from other mental-health challenges.

“We are in expansion mode,” she says.

Putting Experience to Use

Personal experiences inspired Weber and her co-founder, Holly Sherman, to start the Haven. In 2005, after her fourth DUI, Weber, a Southern California marketing executive, lost her career and became estranged from her family. She spent three months in prison.

Sherman had worked in journalism and law and was about to get married when she was picked up in Austin for possession of cocaine. She too landed in prison, her engagement scuttled.

Afterward, the two women met in court-ordered sober living at a facility in West Los Angeles. There, they started to reassemble their lives but also found themselves helping students or dropouts with resumes and applications to get them on a successful college path.

Those efforts have led, 14 years later, to this unique, flourishing company. Addiction, Weber says, “stole a lot of opportunities from us in our lives.” Grateful to be in recovery, she and Sherman “felt compelled to give back in a way that leveraged our experiences.”

The first campus recovery program is believed to have been at Brown University, where, in 1977, a classics professor, Bruce Donovan, started helping students find 12-step meetings and shepherded them through their recoveries. Lisa Laitman recalls with amused disbelief when she was hired in 1983 to be the sole addiction counselor for 50,000 students on three campuses at Rutgers University. Her boss wasn’t sure she’d have enough work. Needless to say, Laitman was plenty busy as she created and has directed the country’s second collegiate recovery program.

The Haven has grown alongside a boom in such programs. Anne Thompson Heller is a staff psychotherapist at the University of Connecticut’s Student Health and Wellness, a doctoral candidate in the university’s marriage- and family-therapy program, and a board member of the Association of Recovery in Higher Education. Statistics in the field are squishy, she says, because some addiction-recovery programs are in early stages. That said, even in 2005 only a handful of programs existed, but by 2015 there were almost 50. The association now has 131 members, Heller says.

One factor spurring their proliferation, according to a 2018 student-affairs conference presentation, was a 2005 grant from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration that spread understanding of what the early centers were doing. By the 2010s, the Universities of Michigan, Oklahoma, and North Carolina, among other large institutions, started to understand the importance of such programs to recruitment and retention.

David Zentz for The Chronicle

“We saw really exponential growth in the last decade,” says Heller. Contributing factors, she says, have been word of mouth as different recovery options proved viable; the devastation caused by the opioid epidemic; surgeon general and other government reports emphasizing substance abuse as a chronic brain disease and not an acute-care problem to be tackled and solved in short order; and more private donors stepping up to support such programs.

Colleges’ traditional punitive conduct-code approaches may be necessary in some cases, but have not alone been successful in treating the underlying concern, says Nancy Young, vice president for student affairs at UMBC She argues that addiction must be handled like any other aspect of a student’s overall health.

If students are diagnosed with cancer, the university doesn’t provide oncology services at its health services. Instead, says Young, staff will support the students and help connect them to the specialists they require for the best treatment possible. Similarly, she says, if students are diagnosed with a substance-abuse disorder, why wouldn’t the college refer them, too, to specialists?

Minimal Disruption

The Haven supplements colleges’ substance-abuse recovery services by offering a sober-living residence and outpatient programs on or near campuses. That way, students don’t have to disrupt their academic and social lives, as they often have, to get the help they need.

“The nice thing,” says Annette Molyneux, associate dean of students and director of counseling and health at Drexel University, which has a partnership with what was the first Haven on the East Coast, “is that they can live in a sober-living community and still take classes, not lose any time. That’s significant. I don’t know of any other programs that have that option available.”

Weber, the co-founder, says the Haven tries to keep its costs for the recovery residence in line with a college’s housing fees while charging incrementally more to cover additional services, including weekly counseling, drug testing, and peer live-in support. The outpatient treatment fees are covered by student health insurance. Haven treatment centers, although on or close to a particular campus, are open to clients from other nearby colleges too.

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Haven’s services are carefully designed to complement those offered by college health facilities. When considering a partnership, the company sends a team of four to a college for a week of what the Haven calls community mapping — speaking to students, presidents, provosts, and staff and faculty members to gauge the college’s strengths and weaknesses in addiction prevention and treatments. Then the team spends a few weeks compiling a report with recommendations. Those include Haven supplementary services if the college wants them, but also steps that the college can take on its own.

That listening-tour approach has gone over well. The company doesn’t advertise much, relying instead on informal networks of college administrators. Michelle Bowdler, executive director of health and wellness at Tufts, says that she has been impressed with the Haven’s “respect and integrity for the work that is already being done” on campus.

Michael Curme, an associate professor of economics and former dean of students at Miami University, in Ohio, was involved in bringing the Haven there. He said the company’s community-mapping team met with not just university officials and students, but also with Kiwanis officers, the city council, the mayor, business executives, representatives of the religious community, and others. “Universally, everybody was impressed by them,” he says, “including me.”

‘An Isolating Condition’

A few weeks before the University of Maryland-Baltimore County’s Haven is to open, Sean Delehant, clinical director, and Nataliya Rakhmanina, student-care manager, describe the centers’ group and individual sessions. The two are seated on couches in the inviting, brightly lit reception area — beanbag chairs, a Ping-Pong table, and a study space to one side of them and coffee, snacks, and shelves for wellness literature on another.

Groups for outpatient and intensive-outpatient clients are topical, they explain. One focuses on intimacy, sex, and relationships, and another on the neurobiology of addiction. A third plumbs trauma, both stark recent incidents like an assault, and lingering, more-distant childhood traumas. Various Haven locations also offer yoga and meditation workshops, which are open and free of charge.

Outpatient clients participate in six hours or less of group and individual therapy, and intensive-outpatient clients in nine hours or more. Then there are the students staying in a Haven sober-living residence. UMBC’s residence, close to the outpatient center, will be able to house anywhere from two to 10, depending on need.

New clients meet one-on-one to discuss their relationships with alcohol, marijuana, and other substances, as well as their goals. Staying enrolled and finishing their degrees is usually paramount, but longer-term wellness habits are discussed too.

“We encourage abstinence” from drinking and other substances that can be misused, says Delehant. But in the harm-reduction program, one of several programs available to students seeking help for substance-use concerns, if a student feels that reduced and moderated drinking is possible and desirable, “we will help them explore the possible outcomes of their choices.”

“We want the student to be leading the experience,” Delehant says.

More immediately, says Delehant, the Havens are meant to be fun, social environments. Addiction, he says, “is such an isolating condition” that just seeing that sobriety can be communal and upbeat is often a real eye-opener.

A few minutes away, on UMBC’s busy campus on a hill, Nancy Young, the vice president for student affairs, says she was sold on the Haven after visiting its USC center several years ago. She saw firsthand not only the positive impact on students in recovery, but those students’ power to create inclusive communities and to be positive peer models. She wants to ensure that all students, regardless of income, can obtain addiction-treatment services, she says, “and the Haven is a partner that has fully committed to that.”

‘A Better Trajectory’

The Haven’s emphasis on actively engaging in college life while in recovery isn’t right for everyone, say Weber and other experts. Some people struggling with substance abuse need more intensive treatment without the distractions and pressures of being a student.

But it works for many, and when college administrators ask Haven staff members for examples of positive results, they learn that they’re speaking to one. Sophie Pyne, the USC student who entered treatment at the Haven in 2014, was later offered a job as a house manager there and graduated with a degree in psychology in 2015. When the USC Haven started an outpatient center, Pyne worked as its front-desk coordinator.

She realized that she wanted to be working directly with students, supporting them in their recovery from substance abuse and trauma.

“Getting help as early as possible,” she says, “sets you up for a better trajectory in life.”

While studying for her master’s degree in social work at USC, she worked at the Haven as a facilitator with client groups and on case management with some students. Now she is the Haven’s national director for university relations and travels about one week a month to Haven locations or prospects around the country. She has also started a small private practice under supervision by a clinical social worker.

Pyne is more than five years clean and sober. Hers is “a life,” she says, “that’s really beyond my wildest dreams.” She gives the Haven a lot of credit, for understanding college students’ distinct pressures and ambitions.

“I had never had a community at a university. It was almost like coming home.” She recalls thinking, “Wow — I found my people, finally.”