Evidence-based writing on addiction, treatment and recovery for families and individuals, drawn from the peer-reviewed literature and 18 years of practice.
Every conversation is about the person using and the person caring for them. There is usually a third group in the house, and nobody has asked them anything.
The distinction everyone talks about and almost nobody defines. There is a workable line, and the research is clearer about it than the folk wisdom.
You have no authority and you cannot make them. What the research says a parent can actually do — and it is considerably more than nothing.
The instinct is to confront immediately. Almost everything that goes wrong in the following months is set up in these two days, so here is a better use of them.
Privacy is the main reason families pay privately rather than claim on insurance. Here is where information actually leaks, and what can be decided in advance.
The success is the obstacle. Every conventional argument for getting help is answered by the fact that nothing has visibly gone wrong yet.
“Rock bottom” and “tough love” are the most common advice families receive, and among the least supported. What the research suggests instead.
When researchers compared three ways of getting an unwilling person into treatment, the confrontational approach families picture was not the one that worked best.
The career risk is usually the reason a family delays. In practice it is one of the more manageable parts, and the delay itself is what actually threatens the job.
Not an ambush, not a confrontation, and not what television showed you. A step-by-step account of how a planned intervention is actually run.
