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

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

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.

Brad Lamm and his father Donald Lamm

AN ADDICT ATONES
By SAM MILLER

Tuesday, July 14, 2009
He intervenes with compassion
MORNING READ: Brad Lamm gets people into drug recovery by asking, not threatening.
By SAM MILLER
The Orange County Register

The four Lamm boys had a mantra: “I don’t drink, I don’t chew, and I don’t go with girls that do.”

They were the sons of the senior pastor at Friends Church in Yorba Linda. Brad was the youngest, a scholarship kid at a nearby Christian school who offset tuition by washing buses after school.

But at a party one night, when he was 15, he drank a Bartles & James wine cooler.

“I immediately wanted more,” he says. “It wasn’t about fun. It tickled something in my brain.”

Brad kept repeating the family mantra long after he’d stopped living by it. He moved on to meth and hallucinogens. When his parents confronted him, he was a comfortable liar. He kept it together long enough to be junior and senior class president, then he bolted from Yorba Linda for two decades of addiction.

Tonight, at age 43, he’s back in Yorba Linda for the first time. And he’s on a mission.

It’s been 40 years since the classic “intervention” was developed.

The script is familiar. The addict is tricked into the appointment. Family and friends read a list of grievances, demand the addict give up drugs, and threaten him with consequences – stop drinking or you’ll never see your children, for instance. This is what’s called the Johnson Model of intervention, the dominant method since the 1960s.

In recent years, though, the Johnson Model has gotten competition. Some interventionists have tried to make the process gentler, more supportive and less deceptive – a process called an A.R.I.S.E. intervention. Instead of ambushing the addict, they say, loved ones and interventionists should invite them to the intervention. Why begin a process of trust and love with a lie, they ask.

“One of the criticisms of the Johnson Method is it tends to be coercive and can produce a real rupture,” says Richard Rawson, an associate director of integrated substance abuse programs at UCLA.

“The whole field of addiction treatment which had a huge emphasis on confrontational treatment (has been) revolutionized. You don’t beat people over the head with their addiction, and yell at them and tell them they’re in denial. You work with them on their ambivalence to get them into treatment. The system is more human.”

Still, the Johnson Model is dominant in pop culture. It’s become common on TV shows, and the A&E network has turned it into a reality show, where addicts – sometimes minor celebrities, sometimes the crack addict next door – are ambushed.

“I’ve been doing this a long time and I still kind of scratch my head as to why the Johnson Model is practiced,” says Kristina Wandzilek, executive director of Full Circle Intervention, which uses the non-confrontational approach to interventions.

Twenty-five years after that first wine cooler, Lamm finds himself in the center of the dispute.

When he was 35, Lamm got a job as a weatherman for a Fox affiliate in Washington, D.C. He didn’t show up regularly, and reeked of alcohol when he did. His skin was yellowish, his liver was so damaged that his abdomen was distended, and he was drinking about 15 drinks – “big drinks,” he says – every day.

“It was evident to anyone around me that I was having a hard time,” he says. That includes his bosses, who fired him after just a few months.

At that point he had been drinking for 20 years, using cocaine regularly for 15, mixing in methamphetamines in short stretches. But he’d never been in the middle of an intervention.

When he got fired by the TV station, four of his friends invited him to talk about his drinking.

They invited him to make some changes, starting with three months of therapy and daily AA meetings. He would try to stay sober, he would fail, and his friends would meet with him again, in person or by speakerphone.

After six months, they told him he needed more treatment. “I don’t know if they’d even call it an intervention,” he says. “Lead with love, don’t take no for an answer, and leverage the love that exists already.

“I showered and, within 18 hours, I was on a plane to California.”

He entered a treatment facility in Laguna Beach in early 2003. He’s been clean ever since.

A few months ago, a young lawyer in Manhattan was crushing and snorting OxyContin. Her parents were worried about her, so they called Brad. The parents flew up from the southeast; the woman’s grandparents flew down from the northeast; and Brad, who lives in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, called the woman.

“Your folks are in town,” he told her. “They’ve been talking about how scared they are. I suggested a family meeting.” She was shocked, but she agreed.

At that point, he says, the intervention had begun. “We are not going to solve the problems tonight. Our goal is to get her to trust us just enough to help her,” he says. He’ll work with her family, hold weekly phone conversations, and help chart family histories. It will continue for months, if necessary.

He opened a private practice about five years ago, Intervention Specialists, and has done about 400 interventions since then. This winter, St. Martin’s Press is slated to publish his first book about his kinder, gentler interventions.

“The family’s baseline is always, ‘We have to trap them, like an animal,’” he says. “I always have to talk them into making an invitation. I tell them, there’s a place inside you that can either be occupied by fear or hope, and it can’t be both. We get better results with hope.”

For 20 years, Lamm’s life was nothing but fear. He says his grandmother was an addict who spent part of her life in an Oregon mental institution – the one made famous in “One Flew Over A Cuckoo’s Nest.” His grandfather, he says, married six different addicts, before dying of a prescription drug overdose while gardening.

Lamm was close to following their example. Instead, he’ll be in Yorba Linda tonight, at the church where his father used to preach. It’s the first time he’s been back since he got sober, and he’ll be giving a seminar on how to help a loved one overcome addiction using the less confrontational approach.

“I felt the calling of ministry as a boy, but from (age) 15 I knew I was an addict, and there was no room in me for ministry,” he says. “But I found my thing.”

Contact the writer: (714) 796-7884 or sammiller@ocregister.com

Take three and call me in the morning. Three breaths that is. I invite you to do something different. Different action yields different results. I promise.

I spent an hour on WFAN this morning, the nation’s biggest AM radio station. I share it with you here: http://podcast.wfan.com/wfan/1821613.mp3

Onward,
Brad

Sad news coming out of LA this evening. A family loses a son, a brother, a dad. And a nation loses a performer who for all his strange quirks and oddities, spoke to people of all colors and got our toes to tapping.

This photo is from 1984. The year I graduated High School, and before his own personal fall along the lines of molestation and chaos. Also happens to be before the addiction which had already began in my own world got the best parts of me.

I remember this time. Things were still 99.9% good.

Whatever the cause of death is determined to be, families have power in the funk, the crisis, the darkness. That’s what we’re here for in so many instances – to shed light in the darkness. To make hope happen in the face of a loved one who spirals and is in pain.

So tonight I think of a family in pain. And a guy that seemed to be in pain for a long, long time.

Looking for the help to arrive like the cavalry seldom occurs. The change we seek begins right here, and now with a powerful loving invitation to make change begin  – not later, but now. Right now.

Onward, Brad

I read the following in RecoveryToday online, and have edited for clarity to share here.

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On any given day in the United States, one million people are in treatment for alcoholism or drug addiction. It is not getting into treatment, however, that makes the difference. Instead, it is what a person gets out of treatment. The fact that many people do not find success in treatment on their first attempt is due in part to a lack of understanding about what makes effective treatment.

1. There is no treatment formula that will work for everyone.

Occasionally, people looking for treatment will come across other individuals who are already in recovery and who insist that the only path to recovery is whatever path the recovering individual has taken. This simply is not true. The ultimate success of each individual entering treatment depends on finding the right treatment setting and methods for the individual, and everyone’s needs are different.

2. Medically supervised withdrawal is only one step in addiction treatment; alone it will do little.

Frequently, it is necessary for addicts and alcoholics to go through a medically supervised withdrawal period before they can safely enter treatment. However, some people confuse this short 3 to 7 day period with treatment, which it is not. Some people cycle in and out of these withdrawal episodes convinced that they should be able to maintain abstinence afterwards, but never finding success. Seemingly tragic, this allows some addicts to continue in their addiction while giving the appearance that they are attempting to get healthy.

3. Length of treatment counts

The appropriate duration for an individual depends on his or her problems and needs. Research indicates that for most patients, significant improvement is reached at about 3 months. The research suggests that this may be residential, outpatient or a combination of both depending on the individual’s needs. After this initial period, additional treatment can produce further progress toward recovery.

4. Drug addiction is a multidimensional problem, and treatment needs to address all of an individual’s needs

Effective treatment must address the individual’s drug use, but also any associated medical, psychological, social, vocational, or legal problems.

5. Counseling (individual and/or group) is a critical part of effective addiction treatment.

Many alcoholics and addicts mistakenly believe that if they could just stop using for a week or two they could stop using forever. In reality, they need therapy. In therapy, addicts examine their motivation, build skills to resist drug use, replace drug-using activities with constructive and rewarding nondrug-using activities, and improve problem-solving abilities. Additionally, therapy helps individuals to rebuild and re-learn family and social living patterns.

6. Medications are an important part of treatment for many people. Medications such as suboxone, methadone and LAAM can all be effective in helping certain individuals stay away from illicit drugs. Some times frowned upon by some individuals in recovery the truth is that these medications allow millions of individuals to live normal, productive lives.

7. Drug testing during treatment is important.

Drugs are found everywhere, even in drug treatment. Whether treatment is offered on an outpatient, inpatient or in a jail drugs are available to individuals in treatment. This puts individuals in treatment at risk for reusing even while in treatment. It also means that every individual in treatment should be monitored for drug treatment on an ongoing basis. In this manner treatment, plans may be modified to increase the chance of ultimate success.

8. Alcoholics and addicts with mental health disorders should be treated for both at the same time.

An alcoholic or addict who also has a mental health disorder is said to have “co-occurring” disorders. In the past, the question has sometimes been should the person be treated for the mental health problem or the addiction first. People may be using drugs to deal with the mental health problem or they may have the mental health issue because of their drug use. The most effective way to deal with these two “co-occurring” disorders and deal with the addiction is to treat them at the same time.

9.Addiction Treatment works even for people who don’t choose it of their own free will.

It used to be believed that someone had to want to go into treatment before it could be effective. New research has shown that this is not the case. In fact, treatment is just as effective for individuals who are court ordered to do treatment as it is for people who figure out the need for it on their own. Families and employers can be just as effective at getting unwilling addicts into treatment. Stephen King, in his autobiography “On Writing,” tells about the intervention his wife and family performed on him. King did not want to go into treatment. He was seemingly happy doing coke and drinking mouthwash, but his wife Tabitha and his children were not happy with the situation and performed an intervention. Forced to choose between family and drugs, King made the right choice. Interventions are most successful when done correctly and with the help of a professional. For more information on interventions visit www.interventionresources.net

10. Don’t give up.

As with other chronic illnesses, relapses can occur during or after successful treatment episodes. Addicted individuals may need lengthy treatment and more than one time in treatment before they can enjoy long-term abstinence and full restoration to a drug free life. The period after treatment is just as important as being in treatment. Finding support and continuous work to stay drug free will be necessary. A slip or relapse is just an indicator that more work, and possibly more treatment, is necessary. Don’t give up.

Just home this evening from the Association of Intervention Specialists (AIS) conference in Denver. What a great time! I presented a case study on Jason B.. With his family we intervened to help three + years back. I hadn’t spoken with Jason in over a year, and moments after I presented an email arrived from him, sending love and gratitude and good weather wishes from Hawaii. I share it with you because it means a lot to me:

___

Aloha Friday!Brad,
Sending a little shout out from the big island of Hawaii.
Congratulations! you are a wonderful human being. Thank you for all
the help along this journey. We are grateful for the important work
you bring into  this world. it would be great to hear an update of
your story. what is new? what is old? is the book out yet? inquiring
minds would love to know.
talk to you soon, Love Jason

___

UKESAD

Heading to London on Wednesday next to present at UKESAD. Very exciting times these are. To change!

- Brad

I was thinking this morning, here in Toronto, how resilient we are. Am at the airport now, heading home to NYC. Home to the pooch and the love and warmth. I gotta say this little City Centre Airport in Toronto is the best airport experience I’ve had since 911. True. Easy in. Comfy lounge. Human, with wireless. What could be better!

We had an intervention with a family in San Jose last night. Not by the playbook, much behind the door was other than expected. But we made it through and got her the help she was literally DYING for.

Make it through. Overcome. Wade across. Get to the other side. This is on my mind this morning.

Feel discomfort. Eat or drink or drug or rage or do… RELIEF! Numb. Make it through. Repeat enough times, and the body starts responding by storing the overflow. The body responds. Stores. Stretching.

See we get through. My goal is to get through intact. Or at least with as much skin still on me as possible, with a calm mind, a happy heart and a good supply of JOY. Because at the end of the day, our personal stories are made up in large part by the relationships that dot the landscape of our lives.

I’m heading to London in May to speak at a conference. Exciting times. Change begins!

- Brad