What Are Our Intervention Success Rates?

The goals and many moving parts in a professional intervention make it impossible to formulate a single picture of success. It also depends on who you’re asking and how intervention is defined. If you ask an interventionist who believes it consists of a speech or conversation similar to what a 12-step call would be, then the answer would be based on whether or not the substance user agreed to enter a treatment center. It would be a different success rate depending on whether the loved one went to a treatment center; another if he or she left treatment against medical advice; or completed the program; and yet another if follow through occurred based on the discharge plan of the center. Given the many variables, establishing a rate of success can seem a futile pursuit.  

The success rate of addiction recovery following treatment and how a successful recovery is defined present yet more variables in any rating system. A family asking an interventionist about success rates tells us they are unclear as to what constitutes a professional intervention. We understand people want to know if their loved one is going to accept help, something we most certainly want. The success rate alone is not what families should be focused on and is only one piece of the intervention process. The job of an intervention company and its personnel is to help a family understand all the moving parts of the process. Families need to understand there are many things they can do to help increase the likelihood of positive outcomes. At the same time, a success rate should not be based on things over which neither the family nor the interventionist have control. 

What Are Your Success Rates?

Families usually ask about intervention success rates. Many families are taken aback and offended when we state that we do not determine success rates; it is the family and their loved one who determine them. There are too many moving parts to answer this question accurately, and the answer depends largely on the family’s commitment to follow through with the recommended strategies and suggestions. What we can tell you is the success rate of your loved one accepting help and attending treatment is significantly higher if the family doesn’t resist our efforts. The success rate of your loved one completing treatment and following directions in treatment is exponentially higher than a family doing the same in our S.A.F.E.® Intervention Family Recovery Program. We do not say this to make families feel worse or inadequate. We say this because it is true. Families often believe that if their loved one goes to treatment, all will be well. Many families would prefer not to do anything besides have one of our interventionists inspire their loved ones to accept help. When the conversation turns to families having to address their role in addiction and mental health, many shut down. We understand this and the difficulty of having to manage the family side. We also know and understand that for many, this is not your first rodeo with your loved one, and you have experienced the same cycle repeatedly. At some point, family members must look at their roles, the family system, their loved one’s environment and comfort level, and family codependency/enabling as factors that contribute to the dire situation. Addiction and mental health treatment and intervention require all who are affected to participate and address anything and everything that can contribute to or compromise the success rate.

Families asking about success rates often pose the question with an implicit objection. We know this because of our repeated testing of the theory. As stated above, we have offered a 100% guarantee that if the loved one does not accept help at the intervention, we would refund all the money. Not one person in two decades has taken us up on the offer. We no longer offer that guarantee. As a clinician with twenty years of experience, we knew no family ever would. We knew this because asking our success rate wasn’t the real question, nor did our answer impact whether they moved forward. The question was their way of getting out of doing the intervention, never believing we would offer a 100% guarantee with all your money back. We did not do this to play games with people, and as we said above, it was a clinical trial we ran. We would have lived up to the offer had someone taken it; no one never did. The point was to help a family understand that it wasn’t their real question or objection, nor did our answer matter. What it did confirm is that asking questions with implicit objections is just a way for the family to try to get out of doing the intervention through psychological justification.

A Success Rate is Determined by What One Considers Success

Treatment for addiction has changed considerably over the years. There was a time when success meant complete abstinence from substances, when any consumption of drugs or alcohol would be viewed as a relapse. The disease theory of addiction surfaced in the 1960s and changed what is viewed as success today, although opinions vary significantly. Definitions of success can range from complete abstinence; to a small reduction in use in addition to being medication compliant; or just showing up to a therapy appointment. Currently, many include statistics that define success based on anything that is an improvement over the previous situation. A 41-year-old man living in his parents’ basement, taking daily methadone at a clinic, and using heroin 5 days a week (down from 7 days a week), would be classified as a success by harm reduction proponents. Just as with the definition of success for interventions, it all depends on who is being asked and what is viewed as success. If a family’s only goal for an intervention is to have their loved one stop using methamphetamines even while continuing to smoke marijuana, their view of success may differ widely from others’.

Family First Intervention helps you formulate your definition of success. We are not in complete agreement with the examples above, but that is not for us to determine. Ultimately, what a family is willing to accept as successful for themselves or the substance user is something they will have to live with. Our goal and our mission, regardless of the path the substance user takes, are to help a family begin their own recovery. We aim to provide an effective intervention process that helps a family find freedom and independence from the substance user’s behaviors. If addiction problems were exclusive to substance use, then moderation and decreasing use might be a successful goal. In our experience, the loved one’s family is ultimately calling about the behaviors of the substance user, not the substance use. In other words, switching drugs of choice or decreasing use may not alter the behaviors that have exhausted the family. It is not so much what or how much an individual uses; it’s what the person does, and how he or she behaves that most always brings families down.

Family Follow Through and Intervention Success Rates

The success rate of just about anything is largely dependent on following through with the suggested changes. We have heard countless stories of substance users suggesting that Alcoholics Anonymous doesn’t work. In all those stories, we have not yet found one who could tell us precisely what didn’t work. They could not confirm having followed through with sponsorship; not one of them worked all 12 steps; nor did they do an honest inventory of their behaviors. Most of them did not get past the first two steps, yet they claim that AA failed. One of the biggest challenges in addiction recovery for both families and substance users is validating success rates when there is no follow through with the suggestions and the overall treatment plan. Success rates depend on the substance user as much as they do on the institution or the organization providing guidance. Consider the analogy of purchasing a product that requires assembly. How many of us forgo the instructions and then blame the product for its defects or difficulty of use?

Strong evidence suggests that a family entering recovery becomes healthier and is in a better position to cope with the loved one’s addiction. Regardless of the substance user’s decision, family recovery and follow through increase successful outcomes long term for all involved. Addiction is often about playing the victim and blaming people, places, and things for shortcomings real and imagined. If the substance user or family has not fully surrendered to professionals and others who have had success, how can anyone or anything else be to blame? If a family is still in untreated codependency and a substance user in untreated addiction, their notion of success would have little meaning? Even if a healthy, sober person had previous attempts at recovery that truly did not succeed, might that experience still be considered an early part of the overall success? In this context, previous attempts should not be bad mouthed or seen as utter failures but rather acknowledged as a step that led to the current success. Blaming others for our problems and playing the victim card are behaviors that don’t advance the path to recovery.

Many interventionists try to play therapist and clinician while adding on family recovery and coaching services. None of these interventionists is qualified or licensed to do that. Interventionists must stay in their lane after the person accepts help. The best outcomes come from your loved one’s treatment team and the treatment center’s family program. If you choose an interventionist who offers support services after a successful intervention, it will create friction and discrepancies in your loved one’s treatment; we have gone down that road, and it does not work.

– Mike Loverde, MHS, CIP