It started with a flash. When Michael Shakeshaft ran to the window, the clouds were rushing overhead. This could only mean one thing: there had been an atomic bomb blast.

Michael rushed out the door and couldn’t understand why no one else was panicking. But then it hit him: this was a trick to get him out of his house. They were after him and he had to run. He could feel the bullets whiz by his head as he fled.

“I can’t go to the police. I can’t trust anyone,” he thought.

Part 2 of the series:Innovative Hamilton program combines addiction rehab with mental health care

He ran up James St. in downtown Hamilton, into the forest and onto the steel staircase that leads up the mountain. Step after step he climbed, his legs burning, his invisible pursuers driving him forward. At the top, he plunged into the bushes and, while scrambling on all fours, he heard a low growling.

“I looked up and there’s an angry dog, and all I thought it was, it’s over. But then the dog stopped growling and licked my hands,” he said.

The dog’s owner, on the other end of the leash, asked Michael if anything was wrong. Michael quickly relayed the unbelievable events of the evening, and the stranger smiled. Pointing to the brightly lit hospital just across the street, the man said, “I think you should head to that building over there. They’ll help you.”

Michael stumbled over to the glass doors and began wandering the hallways, abandoned at this late hour. It wasn’t long before a friendly security guard arrived and asked him who his doctor was.

“You don’t understand. I don’t have a doctor. I’m in big trouble,” said Michael.

“Don’t worry,” the guard said and smiled. “Let me help,” he said, taking him by the arm and leading him away.

A LITTLE MORE than two weeks later — but for Michael, it might as well have been a lifetime — he sits in a leather chair telling the story of how he ended up at the concurrent disorders unit at St. Joseph’s Hospital, his wiry frame 20 pounds heavier already.

His knees shake as he talks, the words coming out in bursts between little gasps for air. His chiseled face makes him look a lot like James Franco, especially when it breaks into a tight smile.

“I’ve done every drug known to man,” he says, letting out a nervous chuckle. “I'm ADHD, bipolar and schizophrenic.”

“I don’t know the exact moment I started losing touch with reality. . . . I used to hear voices when I was high, like: ‘Take that van.’ Then, as I’d get closer, the voice would get louder: ‘Take that van!’ And soon it was ‘Take that f---ing van. We need it!’”

“I tried to get clean many times. The voices would always go away. Then one time the voices didn’t go away.”

The drugs bred hysteria — or what Michael has come to know as drug-induced psychosis — and it’s terrifying.

“But now things are good. I’m so thankful for the way they’ve helped me. I feel like I don’t deserve this treatment. As someone who doesn’t even care about himself, I’m touched.”

Michael is among the 60 per cent of mental health emergencies St. Joe’s receives each year that involve substance abuse. Until they opened this unit — the first of its kind in Canada — mental illness and addiction were treated separately, and not all that successfully.

Tammy Keddy, a psychiatric charge nurse at the concurrent disorders unit, says at first she was skeptical the two treatments could be combined.

“It was a really big eye-opener for me,” she said, explaining that the traditional abstinence approach followed in psychiatric hospitals hasn’t been working. People would get kicked out of hospital if they used, and then they would relapse instead of getting better.

“Now we’re focused on the client’s goals, not ours,” she said. “We’re not the only unit with patients who use drugs, but we’re the only ones to face it head on.”

Treating both addiction and mental health at once might be the harder route, but by tackling the whole problem and not just half of it, the hospital has reduced relapses dramatically. Michael isn’t there yet, but he’s confident he’s on the right path for the first time in a long time.

He holds up his scarred hands, gnarled from being broken multiple times. Across his knuckles is tattooed the formula: F=MxA, or force equals mass times acceleration. It was a reward — a badge of honour — he received after beating up a bigger guy in jail.

His father committed suicide when he was 2. His mother was a user, and he was raised by his grandparents to save him from becoming a ward of Children’s Aid. He was sexually abused by a hockey coach when he was 9, and didn’t meet his mother until he was 14. It was only then that he learned he was native — Mohawk Wolf, to be specific, and he says he felt betrayed that his family had kept this heritage from him.

“My world fell apart. I started drugs as a coping mechanism,” he said.

Before long he was dealing drugs, got kicked out of school and was thrown into juvenile detention.

“Jail was the beginning of the end for me,” he said. “My family cut ties.”

He then started a long period of living on the street, in and out of jail and shelters, just surviving. The jail stays kept getting longer. First 30 days, then 60, 90, 180 and finally a whole year behind bars.

“It was always drug-related,” he said.

But through it all, he remained thoughtful and introspective. He was always more comfortable with books than people, and it comes through in the way he talks.

“I was escaping from that which I had not dealt with appropriately,” he said. “That’s what I’m trying to do now.”

Michael is eager to get better and his nervous energy needs an outlet. So he runs everywhere: to lunch, to his room, to meetings. And when he can't run, he draws: little pictures in a notebook, Haida masks and wolves as presents for others in the ward. His colourful notes to self are everywhere. On the wall outside his room is a sign that reads: “Just because I hear voices doesn’t mean I gotta listen to them.”

CANDICE BRIMNER is a kind and confident woman. Slim and tall with long dark blond hair, she strides through the unit in jeans and tall leather boots. The addictions counsellor is known for being a good listener, but when patients ask about her past, they often have trouble believing what they hear.

Despite a “normal upbringing” that included sports, a supportive family and good grades, what started as experimentation with a little pot led to excessive partying, binge drinking and cocaine use as a teen.

Soon she started dating a crack dealer, dropped out of school and found herself in a horrible world of drugs, kidnapping, prostitution and murder.

After a police raid that turned up weapons and narcotics, Candice found herself out on bail for drugs charges and hooked on crack.

“I was very naïve then,” she said. “After our house got raided, the police came back to me and said: ‘Do you have any idea of the people you’re involved with? Get out of this while you can.’ But at that point, it was just too late for me. I was hooked.

“I would go on a binge for 10 days and then I would wake up and I would call my mom or my grandma and I would be full of shame and guilt,” she said. “I felt it in my soul that I was done and I was never going to do it again. And I would find myself in the exact same situation not a week later, going: ‘How the hell did I get here?’ and I couldn’t figure out how to stop.”

Candice developed severe drug-induced psychosis and started seeing things.

“I used to spend days on end running from my own shadow. I was a prisoner in my own head,” she said.

It went on like that until one day, in a detox centre, she was offered crack by some friends and finally found it in her to take a stand.

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“No,” she said for the first time. “I can’t. I think I’m going to die.”

It just so happens that the centre’s supervisor, Holly Raymond, was walking by and overheard her. Holly later came to her and pledged to help her kick the drugs, no matter what it took.

From there it was a windy road of sobriety and relapse, but eventually Candice got back on track, went back to school and became an addictions worker.

Last year — six years after getting sober — Holly reached out to her and explained that she was managing a new program at St. Joe’s that treats addiction and mental illness at the same time. She was looking for good, open-minded staff from both the mental health and addictions treatment world, and she knew Candice would be a perfect fit.

“I feel so blessed to be where I am now. Everything that’s happened to me has been for a reason, and now I know this is where I’m supposed to be,” she said.

Candice is unashamed of her past and tells her story to patients in the ward, in hopes it might help.

“They’re good people. They’re just caught up in addiction. You have to separate the person and the addiction, and I truly believe that there needs to be people who aren’t afraid to tell their story, to give someone a little glimmer of hope.”

AFTER LUNCH, Michael gets a six-hour pass to leave the hospital and head into town.

“I’m not ready for a weekend pass,” he says. “I’m confident, but not that confident.”

Heading down the hill he ran up a few weeks before, Michael still wears his St. Joe’s badge on his jacket, publicly displaying his status as a psychiatric in-patient.

Downtown, he doesn't follow the street grid, moving instead between lobbies and food courts, open alley doors and public shopping malls. He navigates from warm spot to warm spot, a mental map developed while he was homeless. Michael talks of his life on the street, years spent surviving however he could. At Tim Hortons, he orders a coffee and when the server turns her back, he grabs a handful of sugar packets and stuffs them in his pocket.

“Sugar packets have saved me more than once,” he says. “When you haven’t eaten for days, they give you what you need.”

At an intersection, a group of guys wearing baggy football jerseys and droopy pants call out. “Mike!” they say as he goes over to greet them. Michael clasps the hand of the first one, who pulls him close and asks: “Want some meth?”

Less than half an hour out the front door of the ward, and temptation makes its first appearance.

“No man,” he says pointing to his hospital badge. “I’m good.”

After two decades of drugs, jails, and poverty, Michael still hasn’t hit bottom. He readily admits there was no epiphany, no revelatory moment that made him want to leave it all behind.

“I’m not satisfied with my life,” he says, simply. “There could be doors down the road that I don’t even know yet. The key is to continue searching for the truth. Take the talents God gave me and use them.”

Michael pulls a little card from his pocket.

The unstoppable artist, it says. They’re his business cards. He hand draws each one with his logo: a tank with a paintbrush for a cannon.

He used to scavenge in the garbage and refashion what he found into little pieces of art. Figurines, paintings, sculptures. He’d set them out on a table and actually sell a few from time to time, but when the police came, they’d always tell him that he had to move along, he couldn’t stay here. Hence unstoppable.

“Any surface. Any medium. Any time,” is his tag line, and he hopes to get a few commissions once he’s out of treatment.

Since he’s been at the Concurrent Disorders Unit, Michael has started keeping a journal. He opens up the book to an entry from his first week that he’s particularly proud of.

“When consciousness regains a firm foothold in reality, and near-perfect clarity is achieved, that recognition of clarity can get you high in and of itself,” it reads.

There’s a steaming coffee on the table in front of him, too many creams and sugars to count. It’s hard to even understand how he’s made it this far and still have the vitality and force of will to continue.

“I’m trying to get rid of the junk I’ve accumulated,” he says. “I’ve only just started.”

Despite a life full of knocks, Michael retains an insatiable energy and if anything this is what will carry him through.

In the bus station, he runs up ahead and draws a happy face in the dust on the side of a bus.

“It might make someone smile,” he says, laughing.

A WEEK AFTER the Star met Michael, he relapsed on an afternoon pass out of the psych ward and was discharged to a detox centre. He left detox after a few days and no one has seen or heard of him since.