Mr Excuse – an interview with Mikki M

Written By Lisa Gardener

Mikki M won second place at the Recovery Street Film Festival in 2024, for his entry, ‘Mamba Attack’.

Today, he sits down to tell us more about how stigma has affected his life, and how it still affects for him today despite his recent success.

My real name is Michael Kennedy and I’m from Burton on Trent. I grew up at my parent’s house and I went to a local school, when I turned about 12 or 13 I was playing up quite a lot and I got diagnosed with ADHD. When I was 15, I got kicked out of my mum and dads house and I was sleeping rough, on the streets, under bridges, in peoples gardens in a tent or on peoples sofas. I got into drugs when I stopped taking my medication, and I started self-medicating with ecstasy and amphetamines. 

I’m now part of a mental health group and we talk a lot about stigma, it’s an important topic but also a sore one for me too. I understand how it feels to be labelled a drug addict and a smackhead, I’ve heard all the prejudices, and I’ve faced stigma both in and out of addiction but there’s a different side to it that I want people to know about.

I had a 3-month relapse in October last year, I wanted to stop but I didn’t want to go back to the people I spoke to when I was in addiction services, because I didn’t know what they would think of me or whether they would want anything to do with me. I was so ashamed to tell them that I had used, but after all that, that there was more support than I expected.

I think I had stigmatised myself, I was ashamed and worried about what the friends I had met in recovery would think of me. I’ve been saying that I would never touch a drug again and then I went off their radar, not contacted them and I was worried about what they would think of me, but they were all so happy to hear from me.

I think a lot of my self-stigma is to do with my mum and dad and my upbringing. I went back into my shell of how I was when I was a kid, didn’t talk to anyone, kept it all under wraps. Never said anyone to anything about what was going on.

My mum calls me ‘Mr Excuse’, she doesn’t understand, she keeps saying it’s all your fault, it’s all within your doing. What she doesn’t understand is that my whole drug addiction is down to what happened to me. She keeps saying that I made choices, but I had to sleep in a tent when I could no longer go home. That’s the reason I got into drugs, with drugs I felt I could filter through how I’m feeling. I’ve never gone and sat with a mate and said this is how I’m feeling, I would have much rather got a bottle of vodka and a bag of pills and get a beat on and express how I am feeling that way. Luckily, I still have my music as my therapy.

I’ve experienced a lot of stigma from my parents, they would call me ‘druggie’ behind my back, they would say when people ask about me, ‘we don’t speak to that druggie’, what they don’t realise is that a lot of things stem from them. My mother and I don’t speak at all now. She feels it’s easier to ignore me. But I feel better in myself now, now I focus on myself.

I’ve been affected by other types of stigma too, here are a few instances:

  • I’ve got a 16 year old and an 11-year-old. I only get to see one of them once a month. With services, I have experienced some horrible stigma in terms of them stopping me seeing my sons.

  • All of my friends at school that I used to take drugs with, stopped having anything to do with me. I understand why they would do this in terms of recovery, as they may need to cut people off but I still got named as a ‘druggie’ by them, even though they had been through it themselves.

  • The few times that I’ve been in hospital, as soon as I mentioned that I’m on a substitute for heroin they just change straight away. They will be really cautious around me, they are scared to talk to me, like I’m an alien.

So what can people do to change stigma?
I always come back to parents, I want to see rehabilitation groups for parents, where they go on their own, something facilitated through services. I want them to go through what they do in their daily life with their son or daughter, or talk and gain new ways to help them rather than just cutting them off and just labelling them, or chucking them on the streets. A meeting just for parents.

In my experience 9 times out of 10, the kids on the streets have been abused in some way, it all comes down to trauma, it all stems from some sort of trauma in their lives. People are doing it to hide things.

I would like to see something that gets families together and gets people to stop going down this dark path. It can start with being kicked out, then they have got nowhere to go, and then they start living in other areas which leads to other drugs. If you have a group that can facilitate and help parents to not let it get to the point where they are going to kick them out its prevention.



I just want people to know how hard addiction is, people call you names like smack head but that’s a person who must be really hurting inside and really upset, their mental health must be horrible.



All these 9 to 5 people who have never been in it, they will never have experienced what I felt. People have called me names and have said I am never going to amount to anything because I take drugs. I wish those people could just experience a year of my life.  

My advice to other people who are experiencing stigma in whatever way is to reach out. It’s impossible to beat stigma on your own.

I want to start a new movement on TikTok, where I share daily self-motivational talks to help other people and start to create a community. Watch this space! I want to continue to help others by speaking out.

Is there someone in your family affected by susbstance use?
These places offer support and guidance:

Lisa Gardener
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