Smaller Sized Programs Private or luxury drug rehabs tend to have smaller, more individualized programs.

Feb 04 2019

Professional Meet & Greet at Recover Integrity

Adam Mindel

Adam Mindel, Addiction, events in Los Angeles, Recovery Blog, The Field of Treatment, Yeshaia Blakeney

Hey Neighbors, 👋

We want to get to know you, build up our personal & professional relationship, and feed you snacks! ☕️🍩

Please stop by for coffee & appetizers as we formally introduce ourselves, get to know you and fellow health care professionals in the building, 🏥 and learn how we can positively contribute to our respective missions.

A core value of Recover Integrity is building a family-like community, and we want to build that out into our professional neighborhood.

We are actively looking to connect with nutritionists, trauma specialists, and eating disorder specialists – so, please! Feel free to bring guests.

📍 12301 Wilshire Blvd, #206, Los Angeles, CA 90025-1073, United States

📧 Questions: admin@recoverintegrity.com

Santa Monica Sober Living for men, Brentwood IOP

Feb 01 2019

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Why Choose Private Drug Rehab

Adam Mindel

Addiction, Recovery Blog, Rehabilitation Process, The Field of Treatment

The opioid epidemic and alcohol addiction have affected millions of Americans, in fact, most people can say they or someone very close to them, have been touched by the massive consequences of drug and alcohol addiction; with the likelihood of death by opioid overdose officially passing car accident deaths for the first time in 2018. Drug rehab programs provide individualized, expert care for those struggling with drug and alcohol addictions, giving them the platform and foundation to maintain long-term sobriety.

Smaller Sized Programs

Private or luxury drug rehabs tend to have smaller, more individualized programs.

Anonymity

At a larger facility, it is only possible to have a limited amount of privacy. The more people swirling around the patient, the more hesitant the patient may be about opening up about his or her issues. People might find it less intimidating to take the next steps to recovery if they don’t feel overwhelmed by the number of bodies on the premises.

The role of shame

Deciding to go to rehab is humbling. The process is hard. Hard on your body, hard on your soul, hard on your mind. Shame can be an enormous hurdle for those reaching out for help. Even when a person is in a location where everyone else is going through similar circumstances, there can still be a sense of shame associated with being at a rehab facility. The privacy and general comfort of a luxury facility help to ease the tension in the mind, allowing healing to take the forefront. When a participant feels like he or she has room to breathe the impact of shame may be reduced drastically.

True family environment at Recover Integrity

In a smaller facility it is easier to connect on a one-on-one basis with other patients. Participants will have the benefit of connecting with his or her peers, developing friendships and a sense of family that will help remove the discomfort of recovery. Additionally, patients also will get to know the staff better, as there will likely be fewer employees present.

Beautiful, Luxurious Environment

Environment Affects Treatment

The serenity that comes with a luxurious rehab facility can greatly affect the effectiveness of the program. If a person who is already uneasy is put in a facility that is stressful, this will only exacerbate the feelings of anxiety that the patient is already experiencing. A lovely nature-filled environment can have an instantly calming effect on someone who has been through months or years of a very difficult addiction.

Comfort | Enduring Long Term Care

Because many patients will need to stay at a treatment center for a long period of time, comfort is of the utmost importance. People undergoing the recovery process will be tempted to return to their addiction over and over again. However, if they are in a new environment that they know will help them feel settled and at ease, they will be more likely to turn to those things that soothe them than to the addiction that has made life so difficult for them.

Amenities

Another aspect of environment is the amenities that are provided. Some of these amenities include mindfulness training activities such as yoga and meditation, which can have extremely positive effects on cognitive functions. Exercise programs are also often provided in a private rehab facility. Exercise has been consistently proven to have positive results, not only on the body, but also on the mind. During aerobic activity, endorphins are released and the stress hormone, cortisol, is reduced. Even the cuisine at a private rehab facility has a re-energizing effect on patients. Those struggling with alcohol and drug addiction will often forgo a healthy diet, and being in a facility that provides balanced and nutritious meals will help restore the physical strength and stamina of the participants. Both exercise and healthy diet can also have a positive effect on self Image, which is crucial so that the patients will believe in their own ability to fully recover.

Individualized Programs

Tailored Treatment Options

Every patient needs a different plan for recovery that fits his or her particular needs and backgrounds. Private facilities ensure that each individual receives this type of tailored and extensive attention. A plan of action that is created specifically to address a patient can help staff to pinpoint things such as triggers, pre-existing psychological conditions and the effectiveness of different treatment options.

Family Input

Because the staff at a rehab facility is only slightly familiar with the incoming patients, they have a lot of catching up to do. They have limited access to a person’s deeply personal information, as a patient might not be comfortable releasing those tidbits to a stranger. Family members who have known the patient for his or her whole life can provide indispensable details that may have otherwise not been revealed. These details can be crucial to the development and updating of a patient’s individual program.

Personalized Attention

In a larger facility, it can be easy for a patient to fall through the cracks or to feel like they are just another number. In a private facility, every patient receives extensive individual attention. The staff becomes very well acquainted with every individual’s particular set of needs. Patients also receive very close supervision from the medical staff, enabling the staff to provide input into problems that are arising during treatment that may be hindering the recovery process.

No waitlist

Large facilities tend to have astronomical waitlists because of the low cost to enter. This can be detrimental to someone who is currently experiencing an addiction. When someone is ready to receive treatment, it is important to strike while the iron is hot, so a waitlist is not an ideal situation to encounter for those who need help immediately. A more costly, private facility naturally limits the number of patients, simply based on the ability to pay, resulting in little-to-no delay in enrollment.

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We are Rooted in the Foundation of the 12-Steps and Believe in Long-Term Care

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Jan 28 2019

Traditional 12-Step Treatment

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Addiction, Recovery Blog, Rehabilitation Process, The Field of Treatment, The Future of Addiction, Video, Yeshaia Blakeney

What to expect in this episode:

Understanding the evolution of addiction rehab & recovery is important to understand where we are heading
The 12-Step program is a spiritual program that evolved after psychotherapy failed to help
This has become the foundation for most North American Treatment Programs, but the success rate could improve…

Traditional Addiction Rehab | The 12-Step Program

In terms of the future of recovery, I think we’re already in the midst of a rapid change in; let’s call it the recovery underground. To understand, first I think we need to understand traditional recovery and where that even comes from.

Traditional recovery is pretty much 12-step based in North America. Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous everyone is familiar with that. The reason why traditional recovery developed in the first place is because the mental health and physical health systems that we’ve had historically weren’t helpful when it came to treating addiction.

So we knew very early on in 20s 30s 40s even before that, that Psychotherapy did not work with helping people to recover from addictions it’s a well-known historical fact. We’ve kind of forgotten that over time but it’s a well-known historical fact. Alcoholics Anonymous came along as an interesting spiritual program with elements of therapy and morality and eventually community and literature that people started to get sober and people start to recover. That worked and works!

So traditional recovery in North America is 12-step and it was it was the dominant form of recovery for the… last eighty years let’s call it. The success rates that we see now, I think they’re controversial, to be honest with you, I think it’s a difficult question to ask, to talk about that, but let’s say the success rates are 15%. That might be generous that might be stingy,

it just isn’t good enough.

What are the Alternatives that are on the horizon for people in recovery?

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Find out if we can help you raise the bottom

Jan 22 2019

Marijuana Decriminalization | The Future of Addiction

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Addiction, Recovery Blog, The Future of Addiction, Video, Yeshaia Blakeney

What to expect in this episode:

Exploring how marijuana fits in society
Being Pro-decriminalization doesn’t mean there is no harm or side effects
We’re in an interesting experiment to see what happens when we decriminalize a substance, the stigma goes away, & how that affects our society in general over time.

Marijuana Decriminalization | The Future of Addiction

I don’t think we really know over the long-term what it’s like to regulate self-medicating marijuana over 5 years 10 years 15 years 20 years and the impact that has on individuals and the impact that has on groups or productivity or our society as a whole.

So we’re in the midst of an interesting experiment to see what happens when we decriminalize a substance and the stigma goes away, which I think is a good thing, how does that affect our society in general over time.

So part of what will be understanding is what does society look like in relationship to mass consumption of marijuana over a long period of time.

Probably chill.

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Find out if we can help you raise the bottom

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Jan 07 2019

Suboxone Treatment | The Future of Addiction

The most immediate thing I see on the horizon in terms of the near future of addiction is consequences of what we're doing now with addiction. Click To Tweet

Addiction, Recovery Blog, Rehabilitation Process, The Field of Treatment, The Future of Addiction, Video, Yeshaia Blakeney

What to expect in this episode:

The Immediate Future of Addiction | Suboxone and the Opiate Crisis

The most immediate thing I see on the horizon in terms of the near future of addiction is consequences of what we’re doing now with addiction.

So, we have a gigantic opiate crisis in the United States, unprecedented really. One of the things that we’ve done to save people’s lives, understandably, is we’ve approached it from a governmental level and an Institutional level, and our approach has been harm reduction. Which means finding medications that reduce the amount of harm caused by heroin and oxy and these drugs and so the consequence of that is we are going to have a generation of young people or some percentage of this next generation that is on some sort of opiate blocker or opiate substitute the most common is called Suboxone most common is called a Suboxone or Subutex and the first crisis we’re going to deal with in terms of the future of addiction as we’re going to have hundreds of thousands or even millions of people who have been on Suboxone or Subutex for 3, 4, 5,10 years and we don’t really understand on that scale the effects of those drugs long-term on the individual.

We don’t know how that affects people’s development over the long-term you know, what happens when you put it on 18-year-old on Suboxone how does it affect the development when they are 24. Maybe it’s hardly at all, maybe it’s a really big deal, we don’t really know. But my guess is it’s something we’re going to have to deal with. As people start to have mental health problems years out of their development may be in relation to the Suboxone the questions going to be how do we get these people off of this drug? And, what I found in my own experience in treatment, is it’s actually harder to come off of suboxone than it is to come off of heroin – it’s actually well known. If you’ve been on Suboxone for a long time, you know, two, three, four, five years the detox is horrendous and often the depression is really heavy and lasts months if not years and so…

The immediate future of addiction looks like what are we going to do with this group of people who will put a bandaid on their situation that we had to do so they wouldn't die but they didn't completely heal Click To Tweet

The immediate future of addiction looks like what are we going to do with this group of people who will put a bandaid on their situation that we had to do so they wouldn’t die but they didn’t completely heal and they’re on this medication, maybe for life or maybe they want to get off and what do we do so that’s a new media crisis that we will be in the headlines in a couple of years.

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Find out if we can help you raise the bottom

Jan 02 2019

The Future of Addiction

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Addiction, Recovery Blog, Rehabilitation Process, The Field of Treatment, The Future of Addiction, Video, Yeshaia Blakeney

What to expect in this episode:

The drug and alcohol treatment industry tends to be very reactive
How addiction works in relation to social phenomenon and social systems; increased anxiety and depression
Prediction: Vaping, vaporizers & increasingly complex designer drugs.

The Future of Addiction

The question of what drug addiction looks like in the future is massively important. What I am experiencing working in drug and alcohol treatment is that we are very reactive. We’re in the midst of an opiate epidemic, methamphetamine use is also on the rise, and we’re so busy dealing with that we’re not looking at what’s coming down the pipeline, which I think is an important conversation to have.

I see addiction working in relation to social phenomenon and social systems, things that are happening in the world around us. I think the biggest thing that’s happening in the world around us, the biggest event of our time, is the rise of technology and the complexity of human urban life; and we don’t know how to deal with it. So we know how to engineer complex systems but we don’t know how to deal with our feelings. We’re not necessarily training our children to make their bed and do the laundry, even though they can be top scorer on Fortnite or whatever.

And so what I see is (this is already happening) I see massive growth in anxiety and depression which are internal disorders that come from coping with the difficulties of life. And so when I think about what’s happening in the future of addiction, I think of what’s happening in the future of mental health. My prediction is that there’s going to be more and more complex designer drugs.

Designer drugs are drugs where the molecular structure is modified usually from an existing drug for a specific application like Pharmaceuticals are designer drugs and what I see is a massive growth in designer drugs and their distribution online and so if you go online right now and you look up how many different kinds of drugs there are that list is growing more rapidly or drugs are coming out in the recipes are available and I think they’re going to be used for people to self medicate to treat feeling that they don’t know how to deal with a don’t know how to live into.

The other thing that’s happening is the way that drugs are being ingested is changing. There’s been maybe seven different routes of ingesting drugs for the last hundred years and when the vaporizer came on the scene I took notice. It was a new way to ingest a substance rapidly right that you can inhale and it’s also concealed you can flavor it however you want so the odor changes. We know that with marijuana THC and nicotine that you could… we have high schoolers that are running around vaping weed and nobody knows, nobody smells it so you can completely conceal it.

Now you can also Vape methamphetamine, you can also Vape dimethyltryptamine, in fact you can be anything that’s water soluble. So you can imagine the mix that you can see on the horizon as clever human beings all of these designer drugs all of these mental health problems and having a way to ingest them that’s hidden difficult for police officers and authorities to detect, parents, Etc.

So, I see a lot of complexity on the horizon and I see nobody talking about it. Interestingly I am not anti-drug. I think human beings have had relationships with two substances for all of history and it’s not a bad thing. The question is how we collectively deal with our relationship to drugs and alcohol, which is a really deep question.

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Find out if we can help you raise the bottom

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Jan 01 2019

“What he found was that the decision to quit was more a result of the impact of alcoholic illness reflected by tensions within the family and other close relationships than a bottoming out per se.” Click To Tweet

Interventions: A Series | Part 1 of 3

Adam Mindel

Adam Mindel, Addiction, Recovery Blog, Rehabilitation Process

Interventions: A Three-Part Series

by Adam Mindel and Ben Goodman

Intervention on account of its ubiquity is a term ingrained in the consciousness of modern culture

and has been for quite some time. Part of this has to do with the success of the reality TV show bearing the title, but more importantly, it reflects the prevalence of substance abuse permeating modern life.

Common familiarity with intervention has been honed to the point of parody. Recall the Sopranos, where Christopher’s intervention for heroin abuse ends with a stomping by Ralphie and Paulie and a trip to the emergency room.

The scenario contrasts starkly from the ideal’s intervention aims for which are a reckoning within the substance abuser and the emergence of a path towards recovery for all concerned, user, family, loved ones. Intervention is the medium through which light breaks on the horizon and life can resume.

“Intervention is the medium through which light breaks on the horizon and life can resume.” Click To Tweet

A long-held notion within traditional recovery circles has been the idea that a user had to “hit bottom” before becoming vulnerable enough to accept or seek help.

Such a bottom was typically preceded by a downward spiral, decades-long, and a wake of despair. The proliferation of Alcoholics Anonymous as a viable means of treating addiction resulted in a foreseeable alternative as the book 12 Steps and 12 Traditions stated, “It was obviously necessary to raise the bottom the rest of us had to hit to the point where it would hit them.”

When Vernon Johnson was developing the initial model of intervention in the late Sixties and early Seventies, preventing the addict’s death was his chief concern. Seeking out the best approach in doing this, Johnson studied 200 recovering alcoholics attempting to answer the question, “What made them want to quit drinking?”

What he found was that the decision to quit was more a result of the impact of alcoholic illness reflected by tensions within the family and other close relationships than a bottoming out per se.

Interventions have evolved over the years from Johnson Method to Invitational, Systemic, Engagement, and simply Collaborative models that work side by side with individuals and their families to harness family tensions and mobilize the power of love and attachment to create the essential willingness required for individuals to enter treatment. (next month’s blog will discuss different styles of intervention in depth)

The ensuing years, as it turns out, have seen intervention become the most promising means of raising the bottom for individuals suffering from the disease of addiction. Adam Mindel, Program Director of Recover Integrity and Interventionist, is impassioned about raising the bottom. Adam states that with more than 72,000 overdose deaths including opiates and all drugs of abuse in 2017 we have no choice to but to “raise the bottom”. The old saying that each and every addict has to bottom out first is no longer relevant when there is such lethality.

According to The American Society of Addiction Medicine, Addiction is a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory, and related circuitry. Dysfunction in these circuits leads to characteristic biological, psychological, social and spiritual manifestations. This is reflected in an individual pathologically pursuing reward and/or relief by substance use and other behaviors.

if addiction is brain disease as described above by the chronic pathological seeking of substances, does it make sense for us as families and society to expect our addicted loved ones magically to wake up one day and separate… Click To Tweet

Therefore, if addiction is brain disease as described above by the chronic pathological seeking of substances, does it make sense for us as families and society to expect our addicted loved ones magically to wake up one day and separate themselves from the disease of addiction. Furthermore, if addiction is characterized by neurochemical, personality, cognitive and mood disturbances, we must recognize that many individuals have lost the ability to separate themselves from chronic use.

Adam describes a series of cases involving intervention with clients drinking themselves to the point which each of them required hospitalization, who were pathologically defended in accepting treatment due to changes in their personality as a result of neurochemical changes in the brain caused by alcoholism. Each of these client’s neurochemistry was so affected that they lost a degree of insight to the severity of their alcoholism and were operating on a day to day basis in “limbic survival like responses” which were servicing their alcoholism in either seeking alcohol or protecting continued use.

With the stakes this high, the question becomes not whether to intervene, but how and when to intervene on an addicted person.

For further information please contact Adam Mindel directly at amindel@recoverintegrity.com, or 310-694-3552, or keep reading Interventions, Part 2, Understanding Change and Raising the Bottom

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Oct 30 2018

Moment of Surrender

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Addiction, Recovery Blog, Video, Yeshaia Blakeney

What to expect in this episode:

Yeshaia Blakeney hit bottom on Pico in Los Angeles
He was pulled over an arrested for selling marijuana
That was the moment of surrender for him, where he said ok. I give up. I lose. Show me the way out…

The Moment of Surrender

My bottom was on Pico in Los Angeles.

I got pulled over. I was selling marijuana.

A police officer said, “Okay if I search your car?”

I said, “Why are you going to do that?” He said, “Step out of the car sir” and searched my car.

I knew I was going to get arrested and I knew I was in big trouble.

I remember sitting on the curb and I felt defeated, not just in that moment, but in my whole life. I felt like I had been living one way and it wasn’t working anymore and that was the moment of surrender for me.

Where I said, “Okay world, you win, I lose”.

Schedule a 30-min consultation with Yeshaia

Find out if we can help you raise the bottom

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Oct 22 2018

My Favorite Questions

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Addiction, Recovery Blog, Video, Yeshaia Blakeney

What to expect in this episode:

If you’re in a real situation that is making your life difficult I would say go inside of yourself and say, where are you stuck?
If there’s a favorite question, it’s those that the answers have a real impact on somebody’s life
I’m trying to get off heroin, what do you think about Suboxone Maintenance? That’s a common question, but important question…

My Favorite Questions

If you’re in a real situation in real time in real life that is making your life difficult, whether that’s an act of addiction or you’re stuck in your sobriety or it’s somebody that you love and you’re stuck, I would say go inside of yourself and say, where are you stuck, what is it you don’t get, what is it you need at this moment, how would you frame that as a question?

So, if there’s a question, my favorite questions, are the questions that the answers have a real impact on somebody’s life.

It could be something technical, so it could be – I’m trying to get off heroin, what do you think about Suboxone Maintenance? Right. That’s a common question, but that’s an important question, right because that question is going to impact your life potentially for the next six months to the next year.

You know, so it could be a technical question around something like that or it could be a question about I keep letting my kid come back home and they keep relapsing. It’s been five times in two years, what should I do? Well, that’s a really deep question. Right. It’s easy to say, just lock them out and let them hit bottom.

It’s easy to say, just keep them and love them, you know what I mean? It’s hard to say you’re in a really difficult situation where any choice you make isn’t good – something bad could happen and that’s the first thing you have to acknowledge, that holding your kid in your house while they’re getting high, does not keep them safe and kicking them out doesn’t keep them safe.

So, my answer, for instance, to a question like that would be to tell your child that all you can support is their recovery right now and if they’re not being willing to engage in recovery than you can’t support them, because the only part of them you can support right now is recovery and that’s a hard thing to do, but at least it puts the ball in their court.

Where you’re saying “I’m not kicking you out, I’ll help you get somewhere, but I’m not just going to keep you here in your addiction either.”

And sometimes a little phrase, I know I had to say that.

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Find out if we can help you raise the bottom

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