Maybe you’ve come to a dead-end in your life, strung out on a daily basis, never being able to see things clearly, running into one stumbling block after another – all on account of your addiction to drugs. There comes a point in every addict’s life when it’s time to face up to reality. For some, that self-revelatory moment comes only after major negative consequences or tragedy. For others, it arrives much sooner. Whichever point you are at, if you’re thinking about drug rehab, there are some things you should know.
Effective Drug Rehab Requires Commitment
The most important point to recognize is that to be effective, drug rehab requires your total commitment. You can’t just go to a few meetings or enroll in a drug treatment program and give it a half-hearted effort and expect a miracle to happen. First of all, just attending a few meetings and not really paying attention is just wasting your time. You won’t get anything out of it – or not much that will penetrate your wall of defenses.
And enrolling in a drug treatment program only makes sense if you intend to be fully present and genuinely involved in the hard work it takes to get clean, learn about your disease, and how to overcome it.
In other words, if you’re thinking about drug rehab, only go further if you are going to give it your wholehearted commitment. Nothing else will do. Relapse rates for those quitting treatment before completion are extraordinarily high. Why bother if you’re only going to be part of that statistic?
But, if you’re serious about getting and staying clean, drug rehab may be your first and best possible solution.
Not All Drug Rehab Is The Same
There are many different settings where drug rehab is delivered. Some are in outpatient settings, others inpatient or hospital locations. Perhaps the best setting for treatment of chronic addictions is a residential drug treatment facility.
It’s important to recognize that while there are many different drug rehab treatment settings, the kind of treatment that’s available in these settings can vary widely as well. Not all drug rehab is the same.
There are short-term (30-days or less) residential drug treatment programs and long-term (longer than 30-days) residential drug treatment programs. These are also called inpatient drug rehab facilities.
There are drug rehab facilities that utilize the 12-step program approach or a non-traditional format. Some are religious-based while others are secular. Some make use of replacement drugs, while others are totally drug-free rehab.
Drug treatment centers and facilities may be located close to where you live or out of state. You may be able to get financial assistance to pay for the rehab or your insurance may cover most of it.
Look for a drug rehab program at a facility that specializes in treating your type of addiction. It doesn’t make sense to go to a treatment center if you have substance abuse and a co-occurring mental health disorder (such as post traumatic stress disorder or PTSD, major depression, bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia and others) if the staff isn’t trained in treating both. Such dual-diagnosis patients require coordinated, comprehensive and simultaneous treatment by highly qualified professionals.
You also want to choose a drug rehab facility that’s accredited and certified to provide drug rehab treatment in your state. Look for CARF-accredited facilities. The acronym stands for Commission on Accreditation for Rehabilitation Facilities.
How to Find a Drug Rehab Facility
There are several ways to find a drug rehab facility to help you overcome your addiction. You can ask your doctor for a referral. You can talk with friends and family members to see if they have had any experience with or know of a good treatment facility in your area. But it may not be convenient to speak with your doctor or you may be reluctant to bring the subject up with family or friends.
A better solution is to do your own research. Fortunately, there’s a great online tool available, the Treatment Facility Locator (http://dasis3.samhsa.gov/), maintained by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Use the locator to find private and public drug rehab facilities that are licensed, certified, and otherwise approved by state substance abuse agencies. There’s even a toll-free treatment referral helpline, 1-800-662-HELP.
How does the treatment facility locator work? There’s a map-based locator where you click on your state to bring up a page where you input your city and state (minimum information required) and then press “Continue.” The search will return listings of drug and alcohol treatment facilities within a maximum of 100-mile radius.
Each listing contains the facility’s name, address, contact numbers, distance, map-it feature and other information. Key to your research is the facility’s primary focus, services provided, type of care, special programs or groups, forms of payment accepted, and special languages/services.
Primary focus includes mix of mental health and substance abuse services or just substance abuse services. Services provided include substance abuse treatment, detoxification, buprenorphine services, halfway house. Type of care includes residential short-term (30 days or less), residential long-term (more than 30 days), outpatient, and partial hospitalization/day treatment. Special groups may include a number of different groups or just a few, including persons with co-occurring mental and substance abuse disorders, women, men, seniors and older adults, gays and lesbians, adolescents, residential beds for client’s children, and more. Forms of payment include self-payment, private health insurance, military insurance, Medicaid, sliding fee scale (fee is based on income and other factors), and payment assistance.
It’s a good idea to select a few facilities and then delve further into their websites (most URLs are included in the listing) to find out more about their particular treatment approach and other information you’ll need in order to make a decision.
How To Choose a Drug Rehab Facility
When it comes to actually deciding which drug rehab facility you want to go to, there are many factors that should come into play.
• Not the least of these is which one does your private health insurance cover, if any? But you should never dismiss your optimum choice of drug rehab facility simply because you think you can’t afford it or your insurance won’t cover it. If other factors are right for you and you really believe this is the best facility to help you in your goal to overcome drug addiction, inquire about payment assistance, sliding fee scale or other financial aid that may be available (or get a referral to a state or local agency that may be able to help).
• Think about what you need to do in order to overcome your addiction. Do you feel that it would be better to be close to home so that your family members are nearby and can visit when the time is appropriate – after you’ve completed detox and your counselor gives the okay for visitation?
• On the other hand, being too close to family may be just what you don’t need right now. There’s a good reason why some of the drug rehab facilities chosen for certain patients on the Intervention TV show (and others) are out of state. Some are far across country. That’s because with serious or chronic, long-term addiction to certain drugs, a complete change of venue is often considered beneficial. This may be your situation or it may just be that you’d prefer to be treated somewhere other than nearby your home.
• You also need to do your homework on the facility you think you’d like to go to. Find out about their success rate in treating patients with your kind of addiction. Also find out what’s included in the treatment program and what are extra-cost services. Something that’s very important to your ability to go into recovery following treatment is the availability of continuing care or aftercare services. These may be included in the cost of your treatment program or they may be additional cost. You need to know which it is, so that you can make your decision accordingly.
• Remember that if you don’t have access to aftercare counseling, you may have a harder time in recovery. Statistically speaking, the first 90 days of recovery (the time after treatment concludes) are the most critical for relapse. Without the benefit of counseling and participation in 12-step recovery groups, you’re more likely to relapse.
What’s Motivating You to Change?
It may seem like a casual exercise right now to think about whether or not you’ll go into drug rehab, but it really is the beginning to what may be your best chance at sobriety. You need to think seriously about what’s motivating you to make the change now.
• Is it because you’re being more or less forced to by your spouse, partner or parent?
• Has your employer given you an ultimatum – get treatment or you’re out the door?
• Have you been toying with the idea of rehab because you think it’s easy or the treatment du jour – having seen Hollywood celebrities in revolving-door drug rehab stories played out endlessly on TV?
• Have you lost everything – your home, family, job, car, friends – and feel like you don’t have any other option?
• Are you at the point where you admit that you have an addiction and want to do everything you can to overcome it?
You may have one or more of the aforementioned motivations for wanting to get treatment for drug addiction now. But to get the most out of any treatment program, you need to honestly and genuinely want to overcome your disease. That’s because treatment and doing the work to overcome addiction is tough. This is no cake walk. It’s not something that you can do in a weekend or teach yourself how to do. It just doesn’t work that way.
So, if you’re serious about getting help for your drug addiction and are thinking about drug rehab, you’re in the best position to move forward. Motivation and having the goal of sobriety are strong plusses to get you in the door of treatment and started on your road to recovery.
But it’s not everything.
Line Up Your Support
What is the situation like for you at home? Do you have a stable, loving family that will support and encourage your treatment and recovery? Will they also be willing to get family treatment or counseling so that they’re better able to understand the disease of addiction and learn how to help you in your recovery efforts? Or, do you have a dysfunctional family, no support at home, and it’s a living situation that you’d be better off not returning to?
Of course, there are many different types of family situations. Some are more fraught with tension and stress than others. There may be others within the close family unit that are also addicted and may not be ready or willing at this time to get treatment to overcome the disease.
The simple reality about your goal of recovery is that no one recovers alone. There are two support networks that most individuals in recovery rely on: family and 12-step groups. If you have the support and encouragement of your family, that’s a huge advantage. But, even if you don’t have family support, you do have the other support network – 12-step groups.
You will be introduced to the concept and participate in 12-step group meetings while you are in treatment (if your treatment facility utilizes the 12-step approach in drug rehab treatment). So, even if you don’t currently have a 12-step group that you attend, you’ll learn about how these groups function during treatment. When you complete treatment, your counselor will recommend that you continue participating in 12-step support groups for the forseeable future. You will at least need to consider going to 12-step meetings for the first year of recovery. Many in recovery continue to attend meetings for several years. They proceed from early recovery to stable recovery and take the opportunity to reach out and help others who are newly sober to get grounded in sobriety.
Get a jump on what you’ll learn in treatment by looking up 12-step groups in your area. You may wish to check out Narcotics Anonymous or Cocaine Anonymous, Methamphetamine Anonymous, Marijuana Anonymous, and so on. Look them up in the phone directory or do a Google or Bing search for them online. The good news is that there are 12-step fellowships for various drug addictions in every major city in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, as well as many foreign countries. In addition to in-person meetings, there are online meetings and telephone meetings, so you are never far from support when you need it.
Think About Your Future
You know where you stand right now with your drug addiction. That’s why you’re thinking about drug rehab. But it’s also a good idea to consider what your future will be like if you continue on your present path and don’t get help to overcome addiction.
Where do you see yourself in five or 10 years? How much will your drug habit have cost you financially, emotionally, physically? Who do you think will still stand by you then? Are you willing to risk losing everything that means anything to you for the sake of continuing your addiction?
Instead, picture your future in far different scenarios. Indeed, when you are in the final phase of active treatment, you will create a recovery plan for yourself that will begin to list things that you want to accomplish (your goals) in your life of sobriety. You might not be able to see very far into the future right now. In fact, you may believe that you don’t deserve to have anything of value or that you are worthless.
Every person has value and worth. The trick is to learn to accept this and maximize your potential. Drug rehab can help you in ways that you cannot yet imagine. It’s the first step on your road to recovery.
Are you ready to begin? It’s easier than you think to get started. In fact, just by reading this, you’ve already begun. Now, the next step is to take it forward and transform your thinking about drug rehab into going into drug rehab.
Thinking About Drug Rehab? is a post from: Drug Addiction Treatment
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