A high school nurse's innovative approach to helping students suffering from opioid addiction

High school nurses have an unusually intimate perspective on teenage life. They treat upset stomachs and common colds, but their offices can also serve as a confessional for students with broken hearts or problems at home.

Aches, sniffles, tears, scrapes: Mae Katt has seen them all.

But at Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School, an Indigenous school in Thunder Bay, the Ojibway nurse practitioner also finds herself on the front lines of an opioid crisis that killed almost 2,500 Canadians last year alone.  

In 2010, Katt realized that more than forty per cent of the students in her high school were addicted to opioids.

A number of students were coming to the clinic to ask for Tylenol for aches and pains. They'd be having sniffles, and [were] quite restless. Part of their complaints were indicating that they were actually going through withdrawal from opioid drugs.- Mae Katt

Dennis Franklin Cromarty High is no stranger to tragedy. Many of its students come to Thunder Bay from fly-in communities in northern Ontario with high addiction rates, and grew up in the midst of an ongoing youth suicide crisis.

In Thunder Bay, the students deal with homesickness, racism, and the disorientation that comes from living in a city for the first time.

Seven Indigenous teenagers who travelled to Thunder Bay for high school were found dead between 2000 and 2011. Six of them were students at this school.

• Deaths of 7 Indigenous students in Thunder Bay the responsibility of all Canadians: author
• Thunder Bay inquest examines death of 7 First Nation high school students (The Current)

Most of Katt's students started using opioids in their home communities, where addiction rates are as high as 80 per cent. "Like any adolescent, they do what they see," she says.

If you look at the history of those communities, it's an area that has been undergoing a youth suicide crisis for the last 25 years… So these young people would have lost friends, siblings, family members to suicide, and I think what happens in those communities, is the parents who are dealing with the grief and the loss found that using the drug was a way to ease the emotional and spiritual pain that they were feeling.- Mae Katt

In 2011, she helped develop a program to treat opioid addiction at the school. It combines a medication called suboxone with grief counselling and other psychosocial interventions.

She and her colleagues also successfully lobbied to expand the program into students' home communities in northern Ontario, where they now provide treatment at 22 sites.

• How one First Nation is fighting opioid addiction (CBC News)

Katt says opioid addiction rates have dropped significantly in her high school. The program still offers suboxone treatment, but they haven't had a student to treat since December 2016.

However, Katt believes the addiction rates in her students' home communities wouldn't have gotten as high as they did if the suicide crisis had been addressed earlier.

"In 1992, 1993, we'd made requests to the federal government for resources. I was the health director for Nishnawbe Aski Nation then (a political organization representing 49 First Nations communities in northwestern Ontario). We were getting a lot of letters that essentially said no, we don't have the resources to give you," she says.

"Even then, no one acknowledged that there was a link between the grief from the suicides and the widespread opioid addiction."

Click 'listen' above to hear the full interview.