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Q. "How effective do you feel drug/alcohol interventions are when the family is required to sever all contact with the addict until they take the first steps toward treatment?" (question from Pat, 1/26/99) A. Are you talking about yourself? Or is another family member the "identified addict" and some professional is counseling the rest of the family to sever contact until they take the first step? It sounds of course like an "intervention" type of approach, and that's how you label it. It could motivate somebody to get help... to take the first steps. It's a way of trying to motivate someone to get treatment. As a tactic it may or may not help. By itself it is NOT treatment of course, but it certainly could be helpful. It could also backfire and make the addict angry and lead him or her to justify continued subtance abuse. "I'll show you!" Of course ANY intervention should be very clear and supportive, but firm. "We love you. We care about you. But we cannot stand by and watch you slowly kill yourself with alcohol/drugs. So we INSIST that you get treatment now. Because we love you. We won't take no for an answer." If that hasn't worked the next step might be to say something like "We love you. You have refused treatment. We care so much that we cannot continue to watch you slowly kill yourself. We will stand by ready to help you get into treatment whenever you are ready. Anytime. Day or night. But we will NOT continue to enable you to live this self-destructive lifestyle by having any other kind of social contact or communication with you. We are ready to help, but not to continue anything that could be enabling. We will not communicate with you, or respond to any overture on your part unless it is to help you enter treatment immediately. We love you too much to risk contributing to your continued self-destruction." Something like that could be helpful. But every serious "intervention" is a risk and could backfire. Best of course is a "live in person" intervention where ALL the family members involved gather with the "subject" and gently but firmly "confront" the person with the problem, always expressed in loving and supportive ways... but also honestly saying what the problems have been and what data support the perception that there is a substance abuse problem that needs immediate treatment. I think the family members should all express their willingness to drop everything and physically transport the "subject" family member to a treatment center the second he or she makes contact and agrees to go. That's different from saying we'll communicate again AFTER YOU have taken the first step on your own. jmr January 28, 1999 OK. Bring on another question folks... we've broken the ice and the first one has been asked and answered! I'm ready for more! I also plan to upload a number of the newspaper columns I wrote for the Idaho Statesman. I wrote about 650 of them in the years 1982-1994, so I have a wide selection to choose from, on a wide variety of topics, and I hope to post many of the more useful ones on this site. There are a few posted already under the "syndicated column" link, and the list should grow as I have time to keyboard them in. So far scanning and OCR software has not worked! More to come! Jim Read January 28, 1999 |
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