May 11, 2026 - The stories that don't get told are often the ones most worth telling. Mental Health Awareness Month, National Prevention Week (May 10-16), and Substance Use Disorder Treatment Month all land in May, and what they share is an emphasis that rarely makes headlines: prevention works, treatment works, and the evidence for both is substantial.
James grew up in East Texas, where pride runs deep and hard work defines identity. He spent long days at the plant, coaching his son's baseball team, and helping his dad fix fences on weekends. After a back injury on the job, his doctor prescribed pain medication to keep him working. It did, for a while. When the prescriptions ran out, someone told him fentanyl could help. It did that for a while, too, until it began taking everything he had built. He missed work, fought with his wife, and watched his children quietly stop expecting him to show up. The intervention that changed everything came not from a clinic or a court but from a supervisor who called him in not to terminate him, but to help. James entered treatment, his wife joined him in counseling, and his children, in his own words, trust him again. He is back at work, back on the sideline, back in his own life.
That arc from crisis to recovery is far more common in this region than the prevailing narrative around addiction suggests. SAMHSA's 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health reported approximately 21.2 million adults living with both a mental illness and a substance use disorder. Of those, 41.2 percent received neither substance use nor mental health treatment, and only 14.5 percent received treatment for both. The gap between need and treatment is where prevention and community awareness do their most consequential work.
The recovery data are worth sitting with. Among adults who perceived they had ever struggled with drugs or alcohol, 74.3 percent reported being in recovery. Between 2021 and 2024, reported use of most substances either decreased or held steady, with measurable declines in tobacco, binge drinking, cocaine, and prescription opioid misuse. Prevention efforts contribute to those trends, even when they go uncredited.
There are a lot of people in Deep East Texas quietly doing the hard work of rebuilding their lives. That is the story Mental Health Awareness Month, National Prevention Week, and Substance Use Disorder Treatment Month exist to tell.
The Alcohol and Drug Awareness Council can be reached at (936) 634-5743 or adacdet.org.
