An intervention is not an event.
This is particularly true with mental health interventions. One of the bigger
misconceptions about interventions is that the ultimate goal is the intervention that looks
just like those we have all seen in movies, television, and reality shows. That familiar trope
where the family, friends, and loved ones sit in a circle reading letters of love, betrayal, and
terror. The final paragraph begging the individual to accept the help they are offering and
threatening to cut off family support. The carrot and the stick. The final act. The ultimate
event…
It isn’t.
Getting someone through the doors of treatment is critical but it is still only the first step in
a much longer process. It’s the end of the first act.
When one person gets sick. The whole family gets sick.
Sometimes the whole family is sick, and they all need help. I was taught that “modern
intervention,” was not simply getting that sole “identified patient” into treatment while
everyone else waits for them to come back fixed.
Successful interventions require that each family member do their own work.
The family is a system.
If the system doesn’t change, we can send someone home with every tool imaginable and
still place them back into an environment that hasn’t learned how to support their
recovery.
For me, intervention has always been about more than getting someone to say yes.
It is about getting to whole family to say yes to their own recovery.
