Kicking People out of Drug Addiction Programs – A Travesty!

My son was recently kicked out of a drug treatment program.  I can’t tell you how long and hard we had to work to even get him into the program.  But only two months after entering, they kicked him out, apparently for a relapse.

He begged them not to kick him out. “Give me any other kind of punishment to make me pay for my relapse, but please don’t kick me out!”

But out he went. He had no place to go, and the shame and fear and depression of having been kicked out overwhelmed him and he went downhill, losing his job. Soon he was living on the streets again.

They said he could come back in a week–if he tested clean!  How crazy is that!

By then he’d had two overdoses. Finally he was arrested–thank God!  He’s “safe” for a little while longer.

But I am so angry at those who claim to provide drug addiction “treatment.”  How could they do this to him? They kick him out for having the very condition he went there to get help for?

I don’t understand this system of “treatment.” They were supposed to treat his addiction, not kick him out for being being an addict! If he hadn’t wanted to be there, I could understand that. Maybe. But when he was still desperate to recover, when he still wanted “treatment,” how could they do that?

Am I crazy to think this was wrong???

I don’t think so.

Here’s a great article at WilliamWhitePapers.com on this very point, “Stop Kicking People Out of Addiction Programs.”

18% (288,000) of all persons admitted to specialized addiction treatment in the U.S. were administratively discharged (“kicked out”) prior to treatment completion.  Those persons whose treatment was terminated in this manner were often those with the most severe and complex addictions and the least natural recovery support resources–in short, those most in need of professional treatment.

The most frequent cause for administrative discharge (AD) over the past half century has been continued use of alcohol or other drugs during treatment in spite of threatened consequences, e.g., the central symptom of the disorder.  In our 2005 article, we argued that AD practices were flawed on both theoretical and practical grounds.

They go on to say:

AD practices in addiction treatment are unprecedented in the health care system.  For other chronic health care problems, symptom manifestation during treatment confirms or disconfirms the working diagnosis and provides feedback on the degree of effectiveness of the treatment methods being used.  In marked contrast, symptom manifestation in the addictions field results in blaming and expelling the patient.  It is contradictory to argue that addiction is a primary health care problem while we continue to treat its symptoms as bad behavior warranting punishment.

Expelling a client from addiction treatment for AOD use–a process that often involves thrusting the client back into drug-saturated social environments without provision for alternate care–makes as little sense as suspending adolescents from high school as a punishment for truancy.

The strategy should not be to destroy the last connecting tissue between the individual and pro-recovery social networks, but to further disengage the person from the culture of addiction and to work through the physiological, emotional, behavioral and characterological obstacles to recovery initiation, engagement, and maintenance.

You can read the rest of this excellent article HERE

This was not the first time my son was kicked out of a rehab or sober living home for relapse, and sometimes just for minor infractions, missing meetings, etc.  I understand the need for consequences for “bad behavior,” and the need to protect others in the program. But there’s got to be a better way to work through these set-backs than throwing them out on the street.

No wonder jails and prisons have become revolving doors for addicts.

I realize now that my sense of hopelessness for my son rests mostly on the fact that there is no real help out there for him, for the chronic addict. There is no structured, systematic support and treatment program for addicts, period.

And most of what is available–the sketchy, seriously flawed programs–are either too expensive, or have long, waiting lists for beds, or require patients to subscribe to a particular religion.

I feel like we live in the dark ages when it comes to treating drug addition. Everyone recognizes that addiction is a major health epidemic, and a national tragedy. But nothing is being done to help those who need it most–the chronic addict.

What’s wrong with us?