Staying Sober After Treatment Ends Summary

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“Getting sober is hard. Making sobriety last is much harder” (Rosenberg). Relapse rates for drug and alcohol abusers is much higher than it should be. Only about 50 percent of people who have attended a residential drug treatment facility stay in recovery (Rosenberg). In the article “Staying Sober After Treatment Ends,” Tina Rosenberg discusses how continuing sobriety after rehabilitation services, specifically impatient services, is much harder than one would think. Many people who experience residential rehabilitation treatment become sober while still in the facility itself; however, whenever patients are out of the rehabilitation center and back into the real world, many tend to relapse. This is due to the fact that these people are not …show more content…
James Mccay, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center on the Continuum of Care in the Addictions states that “typically, what people have been told to do is go to a lot of Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics meetings… the usual line is 90 meetings in 90 days, and once-a-week group counseling...” which is in fact something that many, if not all, patients are told at one point or another. The only problem with this statement is that without someone acting upon this and guiding the patient on how to find these sort of meetings and counseling groups this becomes just another saying to the patient and not an actual resource. Ray Tamasi, president and chief executive of Gosnold on Cape Cod, another addiction treatment organization, gives her input on people's perspective of how rehabilitation for alcohol addiction and substance abuse is supposed to be some kind of miraculous success, when in reality the transitioning between outpatient and inpatient is abysmal. The reason Tamasi believes that the transitioning is extremely difficult is because patients are not given the tools necessary for their own success. Another reason why patients do not receive the appropriate after care is that “insurance didn’t used to cover anything post-discharge” (Madly Chalk) which led to many unwanted expenses. Ethos is not only used to persuade the reader that because of these disadvantages relapse is common, but also to persuade them that with the right tools relapse can be preventable. This is shown through Lisa Marsch’s example of the app “Square2” being proven to help people with cognitive behavior therapy and pain that may accompany substance abuse. “In randomized trials, people who used it had higher rates of abstinence and were more likely to stay in a recovery program than those in

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