Getting Someone Into Treatment

Hey, guys. Chris from Cadre here. I hope I got the technology right here. I've had a few questions and conversations with people about the initial phase of getting into treatment, helping your loved one get into treatment, get yourself into treatment. So we're going to talk a little bit about just those basics. So just straight up from the beginning, really not knowing much about how the process works. If you have coverage, if you have health coverage, there are several treatment centers that are open to you, probably in your state.

First depends on what kind of coverage you have. You have big commercial policy. You can go just about anywhere. Some of the expensive ones are upwards of 30, 40, 50, $60,000 for a month. Most treatment centers require some sort of assessment before you come in. They want to know your history. They want to know what's been going on. They want to know their kind of status of your mental health to a degree. And this assessment or review sort of process can take place in different ways. You can get the assessment done on the phone with the treatment center you're trying to get into.

You can get an assessment done by a healthcare professional, mental health professional, where you are, and use that assessment to get in. You have. If you're trying to help somebody get in, the first thing you have to consider is, do you have a willing participant? Because if you don't have a willing participant, you got a whole nother bag of problems. So let's just assume we have a willing participant. We have to get them detoxed, potentially. Some treatment centers have their own detox. You can walk in there at a 45 degree angle, drunk as a skunk, and they'll take you and they'll put you in their own detox, and then they'll put you in Genpop, so to speak, or matriculate into regular treatment groups every day when they think you're ready.

That's mostly about safety over seizures and withdrawal symptoms. So if you're going to go into heavy withdrawals from opioids, you can't go to treatment without cleaning up first. You can't sit still, etcetera. The withdrawal from booze is incredibly dangerous. So they want to make sure you're not going to have seizures. And there are other drugs have different kind of withdrawal symptoms, and they can manage that at places like Hazelden and Karen foundation and bigger treatment centers where they literally have their own detox built in to the treatment center.

So you can just walk in a lot of other ones, you have to detox first, or they might even facilitate taking you there. They might take you to the county detox or a local private detox and get you cleaned up for two or three days and then come get you and take you to treatment. I think what I'd to be most helpful here would be to help people who have known nothing about this process. So the assessment has to happen, the detox has to happen, that the assessment includes some mental health questions.

If you've been someone who's had suicide attempts or suicide ideation recently or been incarcerated or you've had other things go on around mental health, there are certain treatment centers who may balk and they may not take you. So you have to understand that and get through that process. Then comes payment where you have to process the insurance. You can call your own insurance company and ask them what am I covered for? And see what you're covered for. A lot of times it's local, a lot of times people have insurance and it works within your state, not necessarily nationally.

There's length of stay to consider. Most are 30 days, some are 90 days. Depends. Sometimes the treatment center has to reevaluate every couple of weeks and then send a letter to your treat. Your insurance company said they still need help and then you get two more weeks and so on and so forth. But I think what probably people run into the most with snags as they don't know where to start and they end up going online and saying, hey, I need to go to treatment. Be super careful about that. You're going to end up with people who are really just looking to sell the referral to someone or tell you they're a treatment center when really they're just a referral bank and they're just going to forward your call to someone else and get some sort of payment for that.

Not everybody's unethical. Not everybody's a cheat. Some treatment centers are wonderful. Most, I think are probably pretty great. I know a lot of really great ones. But I think to really make the process a little smoother, ask somebody who's done it before, someone like me. There's lots of people like me around who can walk you through the process, hand hold you through the process. If you were to call a lot of some treatment centers and say I have a loved one, I want to get them into treatment, I'm not sure about their willingness level at the moment.

Is there someone you can give me a phone number for that can help me with that? And then you can hire somebody sometimes for a reasonable amount of money and they'll help you navigate the whole thing and they'll help convince the other, you know, your loved one to go. The formal version of that is an intervention. It's not necessarily needed every single time, but there are lots of ways to navigate an unwilling participant. I hope that it's been helpful to go over some of this stuff. I know it sort of gets kind of complicated, and usually we're dealing with some drama.

Something has happened, and so the family is sort of, we got to do treatment now, or maybe the holidays are coming, and everyone's kind of like, we can't have this person home. We've got to get them into treatment. And it's kind of a panic. And so getting into treatment can seem tedious, you know, like sometimes, you know, it just gets bogged down in red tape, so to speak. And I want to simplify that or help people to simplify that by clearing up some of the main pieces of what the treatment centers are going to ask you in order to admit to your loved one.

But there are lots of people, like I said out there, that can help. And a lot of treatment centers will. Will give you names of people who can help you get them. In a lot of times, those people are called case managements or case managers or family consultants. And a lot of treatment centers have lists of those people in there, and they're ready to. They can give you the phone number so that you can reach somebody. I hope this has been helpful. Hope everybody has a great holiday. See you next time.