Drug Rehab Center

At Sunshine Coast Health Center, we welcome back clients who have had a relapse with open arms. When I say ‘open arms’ I mean that we no longer worry about how many times they have relapsed. A few years back we did worry about how many times clients relapsed before we would refer them to another program. Why?

Perhaps it was because we were worried about the impact a multiple-relapsing client would have on clients who were in the program for the first time. For example, perhaps clients might doubt the program (‘Gee, I guess this program’s no good if alumni keep coming back’) or doubt themselves (‘If he can’t stay clean and sober, how can I?’).  

Also, it would hurt our ‘success rate’ to keep re-admitting a chronic relapser.

Another concern we had was that we would be unable to teach the client anything new if they kept coming back.

I still recall having a staff meeting where we tried to assign a number of relapses a client could have before we would no longer accept them back. Eventually, we came up with a number but it never became policy.

Fortunately, as we have grown as an alcohol and drug treatment center our policy on relapsing clients has also ‘grown up.’ It is now based more on the needs of the client and less on what’s best for Sunshine Coast. In the end, it became clear to us that if we:

1. claim to offer individualized treatment, then the relapsing client should always receive a fresh, effective treatment plan that builds upon previous treatment episodes;
2. believe that addiction is a chronic condition then there is no better way to drive this message home to clients than to have them meet program alumni who have relapsed;
3. say we are “Partners in Recovery” there should be no arbitrary deadline when support is no longer provided;
4. want to reduce our relapse rates, there is no better way than to work with chronic relapsers .

So, when it comes to the ‘r’ word, at Sunshine Coast we decided to pull our collective heads out of the sand and acknowledge that, yes, our clients do relapse. If they weren’t, there would be a line-up from Powell River to Vancouver of people from all corners of the globe waiting for their turn.

One final note: Sunshine Coast now has relapse prevention programs that have been implemented in consultation with Terence T. Gorski, Stephen Grinstead, and CENAPS Corporation. By October 2008, Sunshine Coast Health Center hopes to be the first Gorski-CENAPS Certified Relapse Prevention Center in Canada.

Daniel Jordan is the General Manager of Sunshine Coast Health Center. His posts in “Life in the Drug Rehab Business” are designed to lower the veil on the secretive world of addiction treatment. By being transparent, Daniel believes that Sunshine Coast can help lead the way to a lowering of the stigma attached addiction and, at the same time, raise the standard of today’s addiction treatment programs. 

Tags: Add new tag, addiction treatment, CENAPS, Gorski, Gorski-CENAPS, relapse, relapse prevention, success rates

This entry was posted on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 6:09 pm and is filed under Life in the Drug Rehab Business. 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.