Catja - Gadens Stemmer

For many years, Catja saw herself as a weak woman. Today she knows how strong she is - she has survived 15 years of substance abuse, countless overdoses, biker environments, and violent relationships. Now she lives without drugs and has come to understand that her addiction was largely rooted in untreated ADHD and trauma she never received help for.

She grew up with low self-worth and a difficult childhood, with a father who was himself an addict. At 18, she got a violent boyfriend who gave her cocaine to numb her physical and psychological pain - and it quickly became the center of her life. At 21, she had her first overdose, followed by many more. The relationships all had one thing in common: violence. Shame ran deep, and each time a relationship ended, the abuse worsened.

She was assessed for ADHD several times. The first time, medication helped her out of addiction for nine months, but too high a dose made her psychotic, and she relapsed. In the years that followed, she cycled in and out of closed psychiatric wards with psychoses and overdoses, and her addiction grew to include both cocaine and heroin. Addiction is expensive - several thousand kroner a day - and as a woman, she found her own way to survive, which has left its mark on her.

At a treatment facility, she finally got the right ADHD medication, and it became clear that she had been self-medicating all those years. Today she lives without alcohol and drugs, and at this event she tells how she got here.