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Scaling Hope

Photo by Benjamin Norman
In 2014, Stephen D’Antonio (MBA 1986) was living the life he had always envisioned. He’d been a partner at Morgan Stanley for two decades and he now sat on the Firm Management Committee and was the COO of the global fixed income division. He and his wife were raising five kids, all attending good schools; the eldest was working on Wall Street. Then, around midnight one Saturday in March, his youngest child, age 16, returned home in tears. He’d been about to take his own life, he told his parents, driven by an alcohol addiction he had hidden from them. It was a night that would change both his son’s life and D’Antonio’s.
Today, both men work in the addiction treatment industry. D’Antonio’s son, now with more than six years continuous sobriety, is trained as a peer recovery coach, supporting others struggling with addiction. D’Antonio, trained as a parent peer coach for families, is using his years of business experience to build the tools he wished had been available when his family was confronting addiction and sharing his own experience of the recovery path.
D’Antonio, who attended Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative, a program designed to help established leaders create scalable social change, is the cofounder of My Child & Addiction, a podcast to educate and support parents of children struggling with addiction. He is also the executive vice president of Shatterproof, where his work has included building an electronic learning platform marketed to corporations. “It turns out that, in the average company in America, 25 percent of employees are directly dealing with addiction; 9 percent have an addiction problem themselves and 16 percent have a dependent or immediate family member with the problem,” D’Antonio says.
His ultimate message is one of hope. In a moving collection of essays that D’Antonio hopes will help other parents, he writes of what he wishes he’d known in the beginning: “I wish I had known that there was hope, a lot of hope, and that recovery was likely to happen for my son. I wish I had known that my son could live an amazing life, drug and alcohol free.”
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