More Damage Than Good

I’ve been working in the addictions field for a few years now and have begun to notice some disturbing trends. The goal of detox centres, treatment centres and recovery homes is to help people suffering from the disease of alcoholism/addiction. I have found that some places become so stringent with their rules that they forget the whole reason they are in existence. 

Part of my job is to help clients post-treatment. Sometimes that entails helping them get into a recovery home – a house where there are other people new to recovery and that is safe from alcohol and drugs. These types of homes have applications the person must fill out and send in. One such house in Toronto doesn’t have the application handy on their website. You must call them up and request them to fax the application form to you. In dealing with this particular place it usually takes a couple reminder calls and over a week for them to send you the application. Time is vitally important in helping the population I deal with and a week is an awfully long time. A client of mine called this recovery home in Toronto to have them fax the application over and was told to use the one they had sent for a previous client. This made no sense to me since the previous client had filled out the form themselves. Not wanting to play phone tag again and wait a week for this recovery home to fax us the application I decided to retype the form. The form itself was composed of approximately 10 pages and looked like it was the same one they’d been using since the 1980s (it seemed to have been typed up on a typewriter). Well, I retype the thing word-for-word (I did correct some spelling mistakes and grammatical errors) and had the client fill it out and then I faxed it into the recovery home. Over a week later the manager of this recovery home calls me and says to me, in a very condescending tone, that although the application I retyped is worded exactly the same it doesn’t look like the one she uses. She actually said that she has thousands of these forms and they all look exactly alike and this one doesn’t look the same so the client would have to start the application process all over again. I was stunned. I almost called her an anti-retype-ite. It’s this kind of petty thinking that ends up killing people. For let’s not forget the disease of addiction is a deadly one.

Another experience I had was when I tried to get a different client into a long-term treatment centre. This place wanted him to wean off of a certain medication they didn’t allow clients to be on who attended their program. That’s fine – I’ve dealt with and worked for organizations that had such rules. The part that bugged me was that they wouldn’t even give the guy an intake interview until he was completely off the medication. Depending on the medication and dosage this could take some people weeks or months to do. This further delay can wreak havoc with a person’s recovery. Not only did the organization stipulate this, it also wanted the person to come in for a personal interview despite the fact that the person was a few hours away and had no mode of transportation to get there. Most places are accommodating to such circumstances and will conduct an intake interview over the phone.

These are just two examples of the closed-minded thinking some organizations have towards the people they are there to help. I’m also sorry to say that type of thing happens most often in taxpayer funded organizations. Are these organizations there to give themselves a feeling of power or they are there to help a vulnerable part of society
Dave the Dudew