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What is Intervention When Applied to Substance Abuse?
Dr. George Perkins, founder of the Intervention Resource Center, writes:
"Family/Group Intervention is an objective and caring, unequivocal, non-judgmental process by
which a substance abuser is confronted with the reality of his/her actions by those who are adversely
affected by them with the objective of motivating the substance abuser to seek help."
In his book "Intervention," Vernon Johnson, one of the earliest proponents of intervention in the 1970's,
suggests a shorter definition: "presenting reality to a person out of touch with it in a receivable fashion."
He identifies four core elements of a family intervention:
- Conveying genuine love and acceptance for the family member struggling with the problem,
- Directly confronting the problem of the person's alcohol or drug abuse through communication of specific ways each family member has been affected by that problem,
- Asking for a commitment from the person to seek treatment for the problem (or at least professional evaluation of the need for treatment), and
- Establishing specific consequences if the addicted person is unwilling to cooperate by seeking treatment.
Joe Vaughn, in his book "Family Intervention: Hope for Families Struggling with Alcohol and Drugs," says:
"Intervention is an approach that attempts to establish a floor under the alcoholic or other drug abuser's
descent rather than allowing that person to plunge to cellar depths before reaching bottom. In many ways, it
might be considered a process that establishes a state of what I call pre-motivation, a condition created by
the family in which the addicted person has every opportunity to make a move toward treatment and recovery not
next year, or next month, or next week, but now." He later adds, "Intervention can be defined as a procedure
by which a family (or group of other caring people) confront (usually with some degree of surprise) an alcoholic
or other drug-abusing person in an effort to break through that person's denial about the nature and seriousness
of the problem and get the person to some kind of treatment, before she destroys herself or others."
The Betty Ford Center describes the process: "An intervention is a structured educational process facilitated by a
trained professional in which family members and friends meet with the prospective patient to gently interrupt the
negative spiral of untreated alcoholism and other drug dependency. The goal of the intervention is to facilitate
the prospective patient's admission into an appropriate program of recovery."
James Fearing, in his book "Workplace Intervention: The Bottom Line on Helping Addicted Employees Become Productive Again,"
defines the process in terms of the employment setting: "Intervention is a collective effort by the significant people in an
addict's life--family, friends, and co-workers--to head off a crisis through respectful confrontation, sometimes referred to
as "carefrontation." In its most basic form, an intervention can be a meeting between a supervisor and an employee to
candidly discuss problematic behaviors or performance issues related to alcohol or drug use. It also can be an orchestrated
gathering of concerned co-workers or friends."
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