“Quark”, photograph by the author, Bern 2018
I am employed two or three weekends a month as a minder or “Betreuer” at a treatment centre and halfway house for recovering drug addicts in Zurich. My duties include spending the night at the facility as the lone member of supervisory staff, eating meals with the clients, supervising their activities and accompanying their outings, taking urine samples and administering breathalyzer tests, distributing a variety of antidepressants and other prescription meds, and joining them for sessions of meditation and self-led group therapy.
Our clients typically come from the Swiss middle and working class, are predominantly white and “European”, and have in common with other addicts of my acquaintance a marked tendency to egocentrism and either a concomitant failure of empathy or, in reaction to the affective over-sensitivity that has come to be associated with addiction (particularly in the case of celebrity overdose victims such as Philip Seymour Hoffman), a self-protective closing of the border between self and other, whether by chemical, behavioral, or neurotic means.
Among my unspoken responsibilities as a minder, therefore, and in line with the principles of the self-help program that serve the center as an unofficial “philosophy”, is the performance of a living example: of empathy in action; of open-mindedness regarding others and their sensibilities or “struggles”; of humility and the will to serve, rather than simply to use, exploit, and consume. And as a consequence, the recovering addicts in my charge are, implicitly, to learn how to belong to a group rather than to go it alone, as they have been wont to do in active addiction.
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