Intervention for Drug Addiction
Addiction intervention
Addiction intervention is a pre-planned attempt by one or many people (family, friends, co-workers, neighbors) to get the addict to seek professional addiction treatment, enter a drug rehab, alcohol rehabilitation, eating disorder, mental health, or dual-diagnosis treatment center. Generally, there are two types of intervention - informal and formal. An informal intervention is simply a conversation you might have with the person you are concerned about and sharing some of your observations, asking questions, and suggesting that (s)he seek qualified addiction treatment.
A formal intervention involves a trained professional interventionist, acting as a facilitator and mediator, who assists with a structured, pre-planned conversation between the support group and the addicted person during the intervention. This involves bringing together a group of people with the addict to explore how his or her addiction has affected all of their lives. The formal intervention is normally used when the person has repeatedly refused to get help. The intervention is designed to get the person to take concrete steps, address their addiction issues, and to get his or her agreement to enter an addiction treatment program immediately (i.e. go for an evaluation, attend counseling, enter out-patient, in-patient, or a residential addiction treatment center).
Addiction interventionist
An interventionist is usually a licensed or certified professional who assists in planning, mediating, and facilitating an intervention in a neutral, calm, constructive, and structured conversational process. The interventionist assists the group in learning how to express their concern in a caring and constructive way. The professional educates the group about what to expect during the intervention and afterwards, and how they can present their comments to avoid blaming, and to increase the chance that their message will be heard and the proposed treatment accepted. Then, the group of concerned individuals and the interventionist meet with the addict for the conversation. They express caring and concern, presenting facts about the impact that the addiction has had on them. The group’s message is that they are unwilling to continue to overlook the damage that the addiction is having on the person, and the impact the addiction is having on each individual in the group. The group’s presentation prompts the person to admit that an addiction does, in fact, exist and that it is causing a multitude of other issues and problems that must be faced.
Interventions have been used to address serious personal problems, including, but not limited to, drug abuse, alcoholism, compulsive eating and other eating disorders, sex addiction, self-mutilation, “workaholism”, tobacco smoking, depression, and many other types of mental health issues. Interventions have also been conducted due to personal habits not generally considered harmful, such as video game addiction, excessive television viewing, and excessive internet use.
Formal interventions are either direct, typically involving a confrontative (carefrontative) meeting with the alcohol or other drug dependent person (the most typical type of intervention) or indirect, involving work with a co-dependent family to educate them to be more effective in helping the addicted individual. In the same sense, direct interventions tend to be a form of short-term therapy aimed at getting the addicted person into a drug rehab, alcohol rehabilitation, or addiction treatment center program, whereas indirect interventions are more of a long-term therapy, directed at changing the co-dependent family system.
The goal of a formal, direct intervention is to get the person to agree to get help (attend a treatment center program) immediately. Just promising to stop is not an acceptable outcome. Participants must clearly spell out the consequences each will impose if the person refuses addiction treatment. These types of ultimatums can, and often do, have life-shattering implications, which is why including a professional interventionist is so important.
