Empathy at BETA Helps Teens Beat Substance Abuse

Geraldine started using marijuana when she was 13.

“I was hanging around with friends, trying to fit in,” she said. “I quit for a while. But my friends didn’t want me around when I wasn’t using, so I started doing it again.”

All she did was “get high and eat and go to sleep,” she said. “Then I got expelled from school.”

Geraldine is 14 now, clean and sober, and back in school. And thanks to a cooperative effort by the Lake Elsinore Unified School District and the Riverside Recovery organization, she thinks she can stay that way.

Geraldine is enrolled in Riverside Recovery’s BETA (Behavioral Education Toward Awareness) program. The organization received a $10,000 grant from last year’s Los Angeles Times Holiday Campaign. As part of this year’s appeal, The Times is highlighting groups that serve youths and families in Southern California.

BETA was set up by Jack Ketsdever and Otis Johnson to help adolescents in the Lake Elsinore area who have alcohol- and drug-related problems. Ten to 15 teenagers are enrolled at a time.

Johnson said the youngsters attend two group therapy sessions a week, plus a third session in which their parents are included.

“And once a week, they have a one-on-one with me,” Johnson said.

“Some of them don’t think that all this applies to them,” he said, “but if they stay here long enough, you can break through that denial.”

Substance abuse is not an abstract concept to Ketsdever and Johnson. Both of them struggled with the problem, and both have been clean and sober for more than 20 years.

Ketsdever was a successful manager in the oil business when he developed a drinking problem in the late 1970s. Within a few years, he was down and out, living on skid row. “Then some drunks pulled a bunch of mattresses into an empty building and got sober,” he said. Ketsdever was one of them.

In the years that followed, he founded and ran several substance-abuse programs, including BETA. “It’s a program that stresses the importance of one person helping another,” Ketsdever said.

Johnson is usually one of those persons. And these days, Geraldine is often the other.

“When the school sent me here, I thought it wouldn’t work,” she said. “But there is a positive energy in this place, and I really like it. Otis isn’t like a teacher. He’s a friend.”

A few days ago, Geraldine wrote him a letter.

“Your words and attention have really touched me and helped me to do better in life,” she wrote. “I wake up every morning and say to myself, ‘Geraldine, you are beautiful and I love you.’ ”

BETA relies on donations from individuals and fund-raising efforts like the Times Holiday Campaign to finance its program, which costs about $165,000 a year.

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