Once you have decided to get help for a drinking or drug abuse problem and decided that the you really need inpatient care at a drug or alcohol rehab, you still need to choose a quality drug rehab, and you still have a very tough decision to make when evaluating between the hundreds of drug rehabs likely available in your area alone.

Most drug and alcohol rehabs are run by committed professionals and do offer a wide and comprehensive program designed to offer the most benefit to the recovery process. Unfortunately, some exist for little reason other than to collect your admissions check, and will offer very little therapy of value.

How can you pick a good drug rehab?

Thankfully, there are a few ways to determine if a rehab under consideration does offer quality programming, and one criterion you can use for evaluation is the level of aftercare programming as offered by the facility.

Drug or alcohol treatment at a residential rehab facility should never end with the culmination of a residential stay, and drug rehab treatment should occur over two separate and distinct but equally important phases. The first stage occurs while you are a resident of the facility, and is the more intensive phase; the second or “aftercare” phase of treatment occurs only after you have left the facility, yet return regularly for continuing aftercare therapy and education ( Why you need aftercare).

The importance of aftercare

This aftercare makes an incredible difference, and one of the best indicators of long term success and sobriety is a committed and enthusiastic maintenance of aftercare therapy. Aftercare may include continuing group peer support sessions, will likely involve some form of continuing 12 steps style meetings, and should also include occasional sessions with a therapist or psychologist.

Aftercare therapy assists recovering addicts reentering the community to maintain the lessons and teachings of rehab even in the face of a different daily reality. Aftercare helps those people struggling with sobriety to consolidate relapse prevention plans even when faced with mounting temptation and availability; and when aftercare includes individual sessions with a therapist, a relapse prevention plan can be modified on the recommendations of a professional to meet the demands of temptation as they occur in the initial months of abstinence.

Aftercare is very important, has a big influence over success rates and should be a priority; but of course it also costs a drug rehab money to run aftercare programs. Drug and alcohol rehabs that exist only to collect your admissions check will have little interest in maintaining a long term commitment to your sobriety, while quality facilities do endeavor to treat each patient successfully. One way to differentiate between the two is in the level of aftercare programming available and offered.

Find out what exactly you are entitled to

While all drug and alcohol rehabs will pay lip service to the concept, find out what specific aftercare therapies you will be entitled to, and for how long. If all that is offered are occasional 12 steps meetings, this indicates a low commitment to recovery. If the rehab maintains a more intensive therapeutic involvement with patients after release, the contrary is true, and this likely indicates a more quality facility.

Drug and alcohol rehabs are expensive and demand a significant time and energy commitment, and you don’t want to waste your time at one that offers you a limited chance at sobriety. One way to differentiate between rehabs is the level and intensity of aftercare as offered. Aftercare is not the only thing, but it is important, and how different drug and alcohol rehabs handle aftercare can tell you a lot about the quality of the program in general.



Thanks to Christin Shire for contributing this article to our Addiction blog:

Heroin Addiction Rehab

Memories of past failures, bad treatment from others and sense of loss continue to haunt most drug addicts even after they had kicked the habit. Such excruciating memories sometimes even drag the graduated addict back into the world of drugs and alcohol. The primary guilty party here is the drug rehab treatment itself. Most drug rehab programs just cure the body only. They never care to treat the mind, which is the real culprit in addiction cases and thus throw open the door for re-addiction.

This is where the importance of education programs in drug rehab comes in. The Narconon drug rehab treatment is a qualitative jump over the older therapies in that it addresses the need of the body and mind in one go. It has been found that most addicts have a sense of inferiority, lack self confidence and crave for support. Even though Narconon method treats every aspect in a holistic way, only a few of them have added proper education programs in drug rehab programs.

Drug addiction pulls the victim into a make believe world where they drown all their sorrows and concerns in the dominion of drugs. The biggest task faced in drug rehab is to shatter this dominion and free the unfortunate psyche. This is a long process where great patience, case and attention are called for from the part of the drug rehab centre and its staff. I should caution here that the process is not as simple as you read. It is like teaching a pre-schooler and preparing him to face greater challenges. Like every child, an addict also tends to make mistakes and forgets his basics. However, I would like to add here that these educational programmes have saved the lives of most people who when through them.

Education programs imparted by our best rehab centres contain learning material on effective communication, courageous handling of adverse situations, and solve his or her problems without outside aid. The addict learns to be sincere to himself as well as his near and dear ones. He is taught the lessons of responsibility, gratitude to the almighty, and how to lead a successful life.

Such an all encompassing educational therapy can be instituted only if the centre has the requisite expertise, adequate infrastructure, and to top it all, the right attitude. The time taken for cure differs from addict to addict, depending to his ability to adjust and adapt. It is a slow process, as it takes time to wipe out the negative blots a drug addict picked up during his life as an addict.

Our civil society respects only the responsible and the achiever. An addict is often treated as a pariah by the community, but the family members often bear the brunt of having a drug addict in the family. They also need to be educated as to how to behave with a graduated addict and not to hurt his feelings. A good rehab centre provides educative counselling to the family members of the addict before he is discharged.

The next question is where to find such a great drug rehab centre. The Internet is replete with options. But I would like to advise that you go for a rehab centre that has gained the respect of common people as well as our leaders. It the rehab centre can produce testimonials about the credibility of their treatment methods from our respected institutions, that centre is the one for you. Do not go anywhere else.



Thanks to Daniel Marcus Manson for contributing this article to our Addiction blog:

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