Dream to Reality: the William Magee Center for AOD and Wellness Education at Ole Miss
Dr. Nick McAfee shares tips for students, parents for navigating mental health, substance misuse
Few episodes of my new podcast, A Little Crazy with David Magee, mean more than the one that dropped today. Our guest is Dr. Nick McAafee, director of the William Magee Center for AOD and Wellness Education at the University of Mississippi, the center named after our late son William.
For those who don't know, our son William was in the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College, making A's, a member of the track team, and in the Croft Institute for International Studies while a student at the University of Mississippi, yet he struggled with substance misuse. When we learned he was deep in addiction late in his senior year of college, we foolishly told him there had to be help on campus for such things.
He searched for that help, leaving student health services with a brochure. William's experience planted the first seeds of knowledge in my family and me that we have to help students differently than we did before—that health services, once called the infirmary, are not enough in a world filled with mental health and self-medication challenges.
William graduated from college and went almost directly into residential treatment for addiction. He battled, like most do these days, misuse of an array of substances, including alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, and opiates. William did well in treatment and sober living until he relapsed, as happens in recovery. It's part of the journey.
But we learned that day I found William dead from an accidental drug overdose that relapse these days is more punitive in a fentanyl world.
I'd visited with William a couple of days over a long weekend the week before his death, and he'd told me he wanted to help people one day.
That day has come. The William Magee Center for AOD and Wellness Education (AOD stands for alcohol and other drugs) opened in 2019 on the Ole Miss campus. We have helped lives, saved lives, and changed lives.
Talking with Dr. McAfee on this episode of my A Little Crazy with David Magee podcast, I realized how full circle we have come in this journey. It's real, its impact is accurate, and it means so much.
Getting to this point was challenging and required the help of many. In the coming months, I'll share more about those people and how we built a movement and saw it through. On this day, though, we'll celebrate the conversation with Dr. McAfee and the excellent work the entire team at the Magee Center does to educate, bring down the wall of stigma, and change and improve lives.
The very conversation alone, me talking with the Magee Center director about the work getting done, is a celebration of the miracles that can happen when we decide, enough. Time for positive change.
The lessons from this episode involve both, how we can have a dream that seems a little crazy and almost unreasonable but dig in and see it through to reality with both the help of others and unflinching focus, and also how we can help students by seeing them, hearing them and supporting them against what they face in a daunting world.