Drug & Alcohol Intervention Help - We Get Them In to Treatment : NYC Intervention Specialists

Dateline: NEW YEAR 2010
I was on a plane, heading home in the cold for some R&R before the busy season in the intervention world. The holidays bring folks together – and with that come the reminders that:
1) Things are bad
2) Things are worse than remembered
3) Things need change

Folks call us, with questions on how what we do is different than “as seen on TV?”

We get the friends and family ready to invite the identified loved one to a Family Meeting. This invitation makes for an ambush free zone. It encourages love and honesty by practicing love and honesty.

We help you help them – and begin radical change in the life of someone who oftentimes is dying for it. Let us show you how.

- Brad Lamm, BR-I
Board-Registered Interventionist

It arrived yesterday by messenger from my publisher – a box. A cardboard box, with my name on the label, and a word written on the front in felt-tip pen: BOOKS.

My books. In hardcover. Like the ones that will hit the bookstore shelves in January and ship from online retailers December 22. It’s beautiful. I opened the box up and the fam huddled around the box. Scott, and Oliver, and Bandit. And the books. Was a pretty cool feeling I must say holding that pretty red book in my hands for the very first time. I ran up to have lunch with my friend Dean Sicoli and handed him one. “Send it to me! I want you to write something in it.”

Cool!

I gave the first inscribed copy of HOW TO CHANGE SOMEONE YOU LOVE to Cathay Che. At Cafe Grumpy. It was anything but.

So, cannot wait to hit the road, Jack, and inscribe one for you and yours.

Here’s to new chapters, and books and such. Powerful punch.

x
Brad

photo: simone martin

Here I am, at 43 years old. Wow. When my dad was 43 it seemed so old to my young eyes. “Gosh, but you’re old…” I can hear myself telling my pop.

So here I stand. Recovered and learning and helping and growing in life. What a blessed life it is. Hooked no more.

Since that day my friends said STOP – YOU NEED HELP, so much has changed. I’ve gained, and lost. I’ve struggled and triumphed. I’ve quit smoking. I’ve learned to eat right. I got my teeth fixed. I went back to school. Learned how to be an honest man; how to quit lying. Changed alot.

I became a Board-Registered Interventionist and built a vibrant private practice unlike any other in the world. I have helped folks get better and heal in my private and public life.

I got married! I have a blended family – with three pooches and lots of barking depending on the moment. I have worked with thousands of people, including some for The Dr. Oz Show and The Oprah Winfrey Show. My work has helped to begin a shift to the very paradigm of change, and how it happens.

Fine, fine, fine.

I have a book that comes out in a couple months now as a lead title from St. Martin’s Press. Amazing, all of it. Because, back during that summer of 2002 I had given up and given in to the fact that my addictions would kill me. I had tried to stop, but always restarted the things that were killing me day by day. Didn’t know when, but I knew I would not survive much longer on that path. The alcohol, meth, xanax and cigarettes. The rage and pain and blame and shame. Carrying it all around like a sack of dead chickens.

But then change began and life got better. In centimeters at times, progress was made. By yards at still other times, life got better and from the ashes of a broken, defeated, addicted life came wholeness and good.

So be encouraged. To moms, and dads and sisters and wives: Change begins. People recover. And you can help them get there.

Throw out the old lies about hitting bottom, toss away the myths that your loved one has to want to change. When you’re addicted, sometimes all you know is that you want the drug. There is strength in numbers as we step in to interrupt the behavior, the addiction, the chaos and offer a loving change plan.

This is my 2009 count down. It’s been a banner one. Really good. Great even. I’m not the lucky one – you are too. As you step out in faith to create change in your defeat and hopelessness, we’ll do this together.

Onward,
Brad

I started smoking when I was fifteen years old. Couldn’t inhale regular without hacking, so tried clove cigarettes. Bing bing bing!

There’s a reason they’re flavored. The clove helps suppress the gag reflex. The taste helps attract young new smokers.

No more.

The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act was introduced in the US Congress and signed into law by President Obama, giving the FDA significantly more regulatory power over tobacco; one of the provisions in the law includes a ban on the use of flavors in tobacco, other than menthol. As of today, flavored cigarettes are outlawed in the US.

A good step, but I believe we can all bring up the topic of health costs to our friends who still smoke. There’s no upside. Smoking kills. Shaves life off the body.

Change begins. – Brad

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brad-lamm/mjs-story-highlights-ease_b_268334.html

Brad Lamm / Founder and President of Intervention Specialists
Posted: August 25, 2009 12:55 PM
MJ’s Story Highlights Ease of Getting Prescriptions

As the world is learning of the facts surrounding the cause of Michael Jackson’s death, I watch with a combination of frustration and hope. I am frustrated by the shock and fascination on the part of the media and viewing public at the role his physician played in administering a lethal dose of Diprivan (propophyl). I am hopeful because Michael Jackson’s sad and untimely death is an opportunity to raise awareness of the role negligent physicians play in people’s lives.

My street cred on this topic stems from times like last week when I stormed a clinic in Idaho to put on notice a doctor who had been misprescribing Xanax for a woman on methadone therapy. Her family had asked for my help. They had watched their daughter spiral deeper and deeper into the depths of prescription medication addiction. The methadone she was hooked on was supposed to help her get off street drugs, and it did, for a while. But her “dealer” prescribed her Xanax, a popular benzodiazopene used to treat anxiety and insomnia. Xanax is the same type of drug as Valium, and if you take it while you are on methadone therapy, you’ll get high as a kite. Physicians know this, but most don’t pay attention, and some prescribe with reckless abandon.

If a physician does not take a detailed addiction history from ANY patient to whom they prescribe a drug like Xanax, Valium or Oxycontin, they are abandoning their Hippocratic Oath and essentially becoming a dealer. They should be treated by law enforcement as such. These prescriptions have enormous medical value for a variety of ailments, but without proper screening of patients they are as deadly as cyanide and as disruptive as a loaded gun on a playground.

In a few cases, a physician genuinely may not have known what role they played in putting a patient at risk and would react with concern. Other physicians have actually said it was the patient’s job to act responsibility — demonstrating a profound and gross misunderstanding of the disease of addiction, our country’s third leading killer. Still other physicians I have seen are almost sociopathic in their disinterest and seemed to have no conscience about their patients or their families after being paid for an office visit.

While I felt a sense of accomplishment in taking action against these practitioners and notifying the state medical board of their abuse, I think any real impact comes when someone loses their life and headlines grab the public’s attention.

In watching the Michael Jackson news this week, that same sense of frustration returns. The greatest pop icon of our age died on the cusp of a comeback, while his devastated family tearfully provides testimonials about how his insular network of doctors never had his best interests at heart. His now fatherless children serve as living proof that Jackson’s family members were right in their exasperation. In this drawn-out drama, they are far from unique.

As extraordinary as Michael Jackson’s life story was, the story of his death is shockingly ordinary.

My frustration is that it’s harder to buy a pre-paid cell phone in this country than it is to secure multiple legal prescriptions from different doctors to feed a deadly disease that hurts everyone surrounding the addicted patient. My frustration is that it takes a high-profile, headline-making event like the death of the King of Pop for us to examine accountability among the medical profession concerning contraindicated health risks for people struggling with addiction. My further frustration is that Michael Jackson’s story is being perceived as unique while it’s happening in living rooms across this nation daily, with real loved ones left behind crying real tears and sharing similar bewilderment that a “real doctor” was involved. But as I have learned as a person in recovery from my own drug addiction, frustration is an emotion we cannot afford. It must be turned into hope.

So my hope is that this coroner’s ruling is a wake-up call for more checks and balances in the pharmacy system to prevent abuse of potentially dangerous prescriptions. My hope is that addiction be managed by physicians and the medical establishment in the same way diabetic patients are managed, with their chronic deadly condition at the heart of ALL treatment decisions. And my greatest hope is that I never have to fill out another police report or watch another news story about a doctor who provided a legal, physician directed regimen of a pharmaceutical that amounts to a potential death sentence for one of the 20 million Americans that suffer with addiction.

|diˈnīəl| (noun) The action of declaring something to be untrue : she shook her head in denial.
• the refusal of something requested or desired : the denial of insurance to people with certain medical conditions.
• Psychology failure to acknowledge an unacceptable truth or emotion or to admit it into consciousness, used as a defense mechanism : you’re living in denial.
______

The Schuler crash: Dispelling the shock and disbelief
Brad Lamm

Like everyone else, I have been reading the coverage of the Diane Schuler case and the tragic loss of eight lives and trying to make sense of the tragedy. Most reading the coverage mourn the lost Hance family children and the unsuspecting victims in the other vehicle struck by wrong-direction driver Schuler, but I see it through a different lens and with a different empathy. In no way do I minimize the profound tragedy – but I see a larger and more dangerous story: That Schuler may have had an alcohol problem that no one saw and that it was on such a grand and deadly scale.

We need to replace the shock and disbelief with a teaching opportunity, in the hope that some meaning might emerge from our collective lament. My lens is different because each day I deal with families that have a living, breathing Diane Schuler in their midst, one that hasn’t had a horrible automobile crash, yet. These families are doing one of two things: enabling and nurturing a vicious cycle of addiction pathology through inaction and fear, or crying out for solutions while at their wits’ end. I feel uniquely poised to direct traffic at these crossroads as I was once very much like Diane Schuler, driving out of control on the wrong side of the highway of life.

My family (like the Hances and the Schulers) was largely unaware of the severity of my addiction to crystal meth, alcohol, cocaine and anything I could drink, snort, smoke or swallow. For 20 years I was the upwardly mobile life of the party, good friend and listener. At home I was a closeted addict and alcoholic, hiding in plain sight with secrets most of my loved ones, family and friends had no idea about. I went to tremendous lengths to keep the truth of my addictions away from those who loved me. I would explain my increasingly off-kilter behavior as “I have a fever . . .” or “My blood sugar must have gotten too low . . . ” or “I have a seizure disorder . . . .” I had the resume of a model citizen, not a common drunk. I was a nice person, from a decent middle-class family. And, yet, I couldn’t beat my addictions. I tried and failed many times.

Fate brought an intervention, rehab and finally recovery. I have since devoted my life to helping families that have a person like me among them, or a person like Diane Schuler – an alcoholic hiding in plain sight. Some of us are enabled. Some of us are obstructed. All of us are equally deadly, and we walk and drive among you.

The real sadness for me in this story is that it’s not at all shocking but completely routine. It’s my story and it’s the story of the family I met last night, and last Saturday and a year ago, and the family I will meet next week. It’s the quintessential addiction tome. The collateral damage one collects as addiction flourishes seems to be the luck of the draw, so a tragedy like the Schuler crash appears unusual to us. But that perspective, until changed, will serve to enflame the pandemic and periodically provide news stories like the Taconic crash.

So I argue that the greater horror is the reality of how many mothers make it home each night as their chronic disease state goes untreated. These afflicted people wreak a slow havoc on the children that make it out of the back seat. They are a catalyst for a lifetime of alienation, and their deterioration is nurtured by those closest to them who are too fearful to take action. They are ticking time bombs driving the wrong way in life . . . only we don’t sober up until someone crashes. I know because I see it every day in my professional capacity, but I really know because I am them and they are me.

Addiction is the only medical disease with its own social support system – friends, spouses and family actually assist the pathology through self-interest or fear. No other ailment enjoys this embrace. No other ailment is as abrupt and unforgiving and actually kills innocent bystanders while hiding in plain sight. And none, as typified by the Shuler story, is as preventable through brutal honesty, invitation and loving engagement for change. If Diane Schuler’s alcoholism was acknowledged for what it was and treated, would eight people be dead today? The answer is no. I know because I was that person.

The writer is a board-registered interventionist who does work in the Lower Hudson Valley. Learn more at ChangeSomeoneYouLove.com.

www.InterventionSpecialists.org

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