I have read numbers as high as 4 to 6 trips to a drug and alcohol rehab center before someone deals with their addiction. This involves a tremendous cost in terms of time, effort and money. This leads to two questions. Firstly, why does it take so many attempts at drug rehab to finally to succeed? Secondly, how to resolve the advertised rates of success of 60% or higher many rehabs mention with the fact for many clients it is no where near that number.

For the first question, may have something to do with the reasons why someone goes to rehab. Sometimes clients come to rehab only to avoid legal consequences of the drug and alcohol use. Others only go to appease their family and loves ones. While the pay lip service to quitting they are unwilling to pay the price of change. Dealing with addiction is difficult. Going to rehab for reasons other than a burning desire to change your life forever will lead to a less than optimal result. This may be part of the reason for the high number of visits to drug rehab.

The second question may be answered by asking what is success? If a drug rehab considers success as clean and sober at one year, then a client slips at 18 months as far as the rehabs rates are concerned the client is a success. I’m not saying anybody is doing anything underhanded here. I’m simply pointing out how difficult it is to quote “rates of success”. While shorter term numbers are very useful, drug addiction is more difficult to be successful in the longer term. This is probably why there are a lot of people who have had multiple trips to rehab.

Is rehab worth it? Obviously yes, the alternative is not a life. However, if a client goes to rehab, solely and totally for the right reasons, maybe we can lower this number to one or two.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 17th, 2006 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Drug Rehab. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.