The New Social Worker Vol. 19, No. 4, Fall 2012 | Page 5

Student Role Model

Christine Webb
by Barbara Trainin Blank

Christine Lauren
Webb has what she calls
a “social work disposition.” An intense desire
to help others has led
her to volunteer in a
Haitian village through
Kings Cross Missionaries and to lend a listening ear wherever she is.

This inclination also
explains, at least in part,
Webb’s openness in discussing the challenges in
her own life. She’d like
other people, especially
young people, to learn
from them.

Webb is young
herself—only 23—with
one year to go in the
BSW program at the
University of Indiana
at Bloomington. It is a
milestone she might not
have reached if not for
the realization that she
had serious drug and
alcohol problems.

She denied those
problems for a while
because she was otherwise fairly functional—although, as she acknowledged later, many of
her relationships were
troubled.

Webb had begun to
use drug and alcohol after her parents’ divorce
when she just graduated
high school. (Both of
them later remarried.)
She might have continued on that path had not
one particular college
course changed her life.

It was a course
about substance abuse—
to which she often came
stoned or hung over. “It
didn’t register that I was
where I needed to be,”

Webb says. “The class taught us how to
identify an addict and how you could
be emotionally dependent on a drug
without being physically dependent—that
dependence could be different from
abuse.”

Judy L. Malschick, adjunct professor
at the School of Social Work, who had
developed the course and teaches it, had
no idea at the time that her student suffered from addiction. “She revealed that
after the class was over in an e-mail, in a
kind of appreciation, along with a message that the class had saved her life,”
Malschick says.

What Webb did acknowledge during the class was that other members
of her family had addiction problems.
“I admired the collegial way in which
Christine worked on group projects,”
the professor adds. “Her ability to share
about these issues encouraged other
students to speak about theirs.”

The later revelations not only
enabled Webb to face her addictions,
but to reach her potential. “It’s since she
came out with her own problems that
she has really demonstrated a leadership
role,” Malschick says. “She has done a
lot of volunteer work. I connected her
with the executive director of Amethyst
House, where I do contract work. She
has spoken to groups there to inspire others, and to my class—as part of a panel.
It’s incredibly important to get speakers
the students can connect with, and she’s
close to their age. She has an amazing
style.”

A transitional living facility with inand outpatient services, Amethyst House
has many clients who are in college.
“That’s the age when many people first
experience abuse and possible addiction,” Webb says.

She also volunteers at Martha’s
House, where she began doing intake
work when the homeless shelter was
short staffed. “It was my first experience
with active listening and finding dignity
and worth in everyone,” she says.

Webb had to struggle to find that
dignity and sense of self-worth in herself.
For a time, she was able to give up drugs

Christine Webb
and alcohol—but then she relapsed.
“Maybe it’s because I had proven myself,” she says. “But two months later,
I almost choked to death on my own
vomit, and that was a wake-up call. I
found a 12-step program that worked for
me. I was really ready.”

Webb has spent nearly her entire life
in Indiana, growing up in Lafayette. One
sister goes to IU, as well, and another to
its “rival school,” Purdue. But she seems
like a citizen of the world.

Webb is active in Fair Talk at IU,
a grass-roots organization that raises
awareness about HJR6, a suggested
amendment to the State Constitution that
marriage must be between a man and
woman. “There’s already a law banning
gay marriage in the state,” she comments, “so to add this is insulting.”

Webb also worked with Stone Belt,
a nonprofit that provides group homes
and day services to people with developmental disabilities. There she learned
an important lesson. “The clients who
were encouraged to express themselves
soared, but when they’re completely
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