People having to accept substance use treatment against their will due to legal, employer, medication or other requirements. Treatment providers are required to treat these people without their consent.
Mandated Treatment
Last week's review of Rehab: An American Scandal brought us to a topic I was already considering for a post: the relationship between 12-step groups and substance use treatment. As I wrote, the 12-step model is unworkable for many people, and has problems both in theory (such as
Mandated Treatment
The addiction treatment industry just can't quit coercion. Mandated (forced) treatment is a staple topic here because the industry relies on it, both financially (guaranteed revenue) and politically (offering a "more humane alternative" to incarceration). Today I'm looking at arguments against mandated treatment, specifically
Mandated Treatment
The classic visual for addiction treatment is a circle of chairs, like so: As little as most people know about our world, pop culture has this one right! Just about everything is done in groups—same for other intensive mental health services, including hospitalization. And it’s absolutely for reasons
Mandated Treatment
Does this look like someone with too many rights? The notion of people “dying with their rights on” comes from arguments for forced psychiatric hospitalization, dating back to the 1970s. As the rhetoric goes: a desperately sick person who refuses services, and doesn’t meet criteria for involuntary admission, will
Mandated Treatment
Moral injury is the psychological or spiritual pain of your morality being violated. Whether you have actively participated in, allowed, or only witnessed the acts in question, you are morally injured if you feel ongoing distress in conviction that the acts were (or are) wrong. It may bring guilt, despair,
Mandated Treatment
This is post 2 of 3 in a series on how we talk about addiction. Last week’s post discussed the judgments and generalizations we are all familiar with. Today we turn to pity. Pity toward people with addictions may seem like an improvement over condemnation, but when translated into
Mandated Treatment
This post is first in a series on how we talk about addiction. Stigma and stereotypes are never helpful. While perhaps this should go without saying, a strong contingent in the public mistakenly believes that stigma (shaming, shunning, exclusion, judgment) discourages substance use. In fact, transnational comparative research shows that
Mandated Treatment
Welcome! I’m Rosalie, or Rosey, and I’m a therapist in the specialty usually called “substance use disorders.” “Addiction” is a subjective experience, not a clinical label, and I find it more human than the diagnostic language my clients never use. I worked in treatment and recovery services for