Does hiring a substance abuse interventionist really work?
I was in Baltimore Maryland a little while back having a conversation with a local Physiotherapist who asked me for my honest opinion about whether Interventions really worked or not. For the purposes of confidentiality I will refer to this person as Baltimore Physiotherapist (BP) for the rest of this post.
BP asked me if I thought substance abuse interventions really worked. BP was under the impression that most of the time the intervention process worked long enough to get the substance abuser into treatment, but not long enough to sustain long term sobriety (I had to agree with Baltimore). Seven out of ten times the intervention process works and the substance abuser makes the decision to go to treatment; this makes the intervention a success. However, a large number of substance abusers return to the destructive behavior shortly after leaving treatment. What follows is the statistic that we need to keep our eye on. I don’t have an exact number for you and I can’t tell you how this unfolds from intervention to intervention. But I can tell you that most of the time the intervention lends to being the icebreaker to recovery.
Once the substance abuse makes the decision to choose recovery and get a taste of sobriety, they generally start to hedge life in that direction. I have stories and examples of interventions that have worked from the first day and these people are still sober as I write this post. I have stories and examples of interventions that did not seem to work the day of the scheduled intervention, only to have the substance abuser make the decision to seek treatment a week later. I also have examples of first time treatment attempts that worked for a short period of time and then lead to an even deeper more incomprehensible bottom for the substance abuser, only to find out a few years later that the individual is now sober and doing great. I guess what I am trying to say is that I have no idea how the process will unfold I can only tell you that seven out of ten times the intervention sets the sobriety ball in motion.
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