Recovery requires 'whole person' care
Conventional wisdom is shifting regarding substance use disorder treatment, but given the limitations in rural counties, local officials may have to put their shoulders into helping make that shift, if they want to put their communities in a position to succeed.
By: Charlie Ban
National Association of Counties
Conventional wisdom is shifting regarding substance use disorder treatment, but given the limitations in rural counties, local officials may have to put their shoulders into helping make that shift, if they want to put their communities in a position to succeed.
As addiction continues to compromise millions of lives, the “whole person” approach reflects the science of how drugs interact with bodies and brains. It’s a matter of demonstrating leadership about changing attitudes and offering resources to support practitioners at work.
“One of the things that we’re doing across the nation now, a little bit better at a time, is to make sure that we treat the brain as a part of your body,” said Lisa Macon Harrison, director of the Granville Vance Public Health District in North Carolina, which serves Granville and Vance counties.
“When we’re running a county and we have incarcerated individuals who need access to medication to help their brain get better so that they can become more productive members of our society on the other side of that incarceration experience, that’s my job to have that conversation,” Harrison said, noting that some county officials aren’t sold on the levels of treatment necessary to help people struggling with addiction.
At the same time, the lack of treatment capacity can inspire unwitting migration in rural counties, as Arlene Hudson, a behavioral health clinical liaison for Aetna Insurance in West Virginia pointed out.
“If you’re shipped from Mercer County all the way up to the northern panhandle [in West Virginia], that could be seven hours away,” she said. “Everybody talks about brain drains and how, in our rural communities, we’re losing our children because they’re moving away. Another way we’re losing our children is because they’re being taken out of their community and either put into residential treatment facilities in a completely different community or even out of state. Some of them never come back.”
Hamilton Baiden, CEO for Youturn Health, advised that intervention be done on a sliding scale, that a little bit of engagement and buy-in is better than turning someone off with demands and ultimatums that can be unreasonable, given the dependency they’re facing. Substance use disorder usually takes a long time to progress to a compromising point in someone’s life, so the expectation that rehabilitation can be done quickly is illogical, he said, with 11 years in recovery backing up his assertion.
“It’s pretty simple — I’ve got to forever change everything about my life and if I can’t do that on my own, then I need to go to treatment for six weeks and then come back and act like it didn’t happen,” he said facetiously.
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