I first sought out an ADHD diagnosis when I was 23, and the psychiatrist told me, “No, actually you just have the learning capacity of a 16-year-old due to your drug addiction.” Yikes. It took me a couple of years to wrestle with that message – to make sure I rejected it on a deep level – before I tried again with another doctor. And boom, I was right: my ADHD scored off the charts. No wonder amphetamines help my brain feel regulated.

When you’re beginning your journey of drug use, it is easy to get a bit overenthusiastic and end up lost, especially when you don’t have any elders around to help guide you. Akshay spent a lot of time worrying that cannabis and LSD had given him drug-induced anxiety, depersonalisation and psychosis, but he eventually realised that the people who were trying to help him held some negative attitudes towards drugs, and he needed a more supportive — and experienced — community around him.

Kate is a proud Aboriginal woman who has a history of injecting heroin. She wants to share her unique experience of clearing hep C twice, nearly 2 decades apart. Her first treatment was in prison in the early 2000s, with Interferon. Soon after she got out of prison, she got hep C again and didn’t get treated until 2019. Getting treated a second time has been life changing for her and she now supports peers with hep C and drug use.

Katrina is a peer distributor for NUAA in a small rural town in NSW. She’s known she’s had hep C for 6 years but has found it hard to get treated because of the lack of services in her area and past experiences of stigma within a health care setting.

Siobhan was stunned into silence by her patronising doctor. While that time she made a strategic decision not to confront him, now she demands health workers show her the respect that she deserves.

Check out what the Australian Charter of Healthcare Rights and the NSW OTP Clinical Guidelines have to say about your rights.

Here are some tips for coming off methadone from someone who learned the lessons along the way.