The addiction recovery industry is now a multi-billion dollar industry in America, often exploiting the vulnerable, afraid and ignorant. When you have a loved one on drugs and are scared you become highly suggestible to professionals who want to take advantage of you. In a desperate need to solve the problem, we can be duped into believing ideas and methods that don’t work. Treatment centers have beds they need to fill. If they don’t they could lose their profits and this sometimes overrides the ethics needed to evaluate someone.
Let’s get it clear: most people do not need, nor can they benefit from residential treatment!
Residential treatment is not the first stop, it’s the last one in the recovery process. An addict’s commitment to recovery has to mature and develop over time. Going to residential too early can undermine confidence and belief in recovery as well as expose them to more severe addicts and drugs making them worse not better. Once all that recovery money is spent and residential fails families are often left without any more resources for help and still have the problem, wrecking their lives.
A good, passionate, involved, out-patient counselor can be very effective in treating all the issues involved, significantly less expensive and teaches the addict how to recover while living in the real world: invaluable!
Big recovery centers have huge overheads and want big profits. They are often owned by non-addicts (mistake) and use scare tactics to convince people to sign up for multi-thousand dollar programs. Counselors should not be selling “recovery packages”! They should work closely with the families that trust them, be accessible and work to customize a program that suits them specifically. We should not threaten to throw people on the street or remove them from the care of their families. Recovery is a process, not a cure, a journey not a destination. The methods I hear being used in the industry are alarming: getting “sponsors” with only six months sobriety, go to 30 meetings in 30 days, militant drug testing and control and worse: exile from a recovery program for relapse! They’re addicts, what did you expect? Sounds like “professionals” are passing the buck to others and avoiding the sworn duty they have to help.
Whew! You can tell I am passionate about these issues and I could go on much more if room allowed. To know more, call; I care.
Scott Spackey is a California Registered Addiction Specialist, Interventionist, Life-Coach and Clinical Hypnotherapist. For more information, please call 661-299-1966 or email: Scott@Life-Mind.com.