Today we would like to share with you a video from our annual ATCPCC 2013, Addiction Treatment Centers and Professional Consortium. Here in our guest lecture video series is Mr. John Southworth with Southworth Associates. He shares with us his knowledge of Case Management for Families. We have a transcript of the lecture for you to follow:
I’m John Southworth, and I’m with Southworth Associates. For 21 years, we’ve been monitoring and case managing people that had a license, and I didn’t realize it. By them being accountable to that license, if you want to be a doctor or a nurse or an attorney or a judge or a pharmacist or a veterinarian or a dentist or a dental hygienist and you’ve got a license, you’ve got that hanging over your head. And those people have been very easy – not real easy, but at least they’ve been accountable to where we can get them into recovery because it takes at least five years to get a person where you can get a good prognosis for recovery.
When we work with a doctor – I’m just going to use doctors at this time ‘cause they have a license and they want to go back into that surgical booth – we get the phone call. We don’t diagnose. We’re not capable. Neither are the people that are scared. They’re watching for behaviors. When they see changes in four things – behaviors, attitudes, achievement, or attendance, something’s going on, or alcohol on their breath or passed out – but that’s later stage – but when they first see those first signs of changes in behavior, give us a call and we’ll decide what we’re going to do, okay? We’ll get with the right people, and I’m the doctor’s advocate. Hey, sir. There’s been some things come up where there’s change in behavior with you and some things going on. I don’t know if it’s alcohol or pills. We couldn’t smell the pills or anything. I want to be your advocate and get you out of this jam. We’re not going to have anything to do with the board of medicine. What we’re going to do is you come with me. We’ll get you on a plane. Come with me. We’ll get you evaluated. It’s about a three to five day evaluation, and when we get the diagnosis and the recommendations and it says you don’t have a problem, we’ll come back and I’ll show these people, get them off of your back so you can continue working like you want to. If you’ve got a problem, these people have been great about early detection and let’s find out if there is a problem and get you treated.
Once you’re treated and you come out of treatment with the recommendations from the treatment center – that’s a discharge summary – I’m going to take that discharge summary and create it into a contract, which is they want you to do this, which is check your urine so many times. If you’re an anesthesiologist, it will be, probably, once a week. It will be random, and maybe some 12 Step meetings. Maybe see a psychiatrist. Maybe see a psychologist, go to groups. Whatever it is, we’re going to be monitoring that for you for about five years, approximately five years, and reevaluate you. That will hold you accountable and save your life. That’s what I’m going to do for you.
So with this concept, it works. Right now I’ve got a program that’s three years old with pharmacists. I have 100 percent recovery rate, and I think that’s really great. Now, I know darn well once I start talking like that, somebody’s just having a relapse, but the neat thing that I want to share with you is we can get up as high as 96 percent recovery rate. Our average right now in our company is 76 percent recovery rate if they follow the recipe, okay? That’s fantastic because I’ve heard from my experience that 3 to 7 percent is the national average for 28-day treatment or outpatient. I know, we have to have 28 days and outpatient and everything because of financial things, but if we do the monitoring, we can up that, I’m sure, too, but that’s not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is look how all of our outcome studies now for all these people with licenses is wonderful, and I’m so proud of it. How can I move that over to the longshoreman, the lumberman, the truck driver? That’s the guy I want to help because there’s so many of them but I didn’t have the licensing bureau. That was what is so scary to me.
So in the transition of moving over there, I kept adding the ingredients, just like you would trying to make a recipe for cookies. I kept putting in ingredients like, well, maybe it’s the long-term 12 weeks or maybe it’s this or maybe it’s that. It still wasn’t working. My outcomes were not as good.
So I came up with a concept whoever hires me to do the intervention, during the intervention training, I’m going to train these people, I’m now going to make you the licensing bureau, if you will. I don’t care if you’re the FAA now or I even would think about hanging signs around the family, you are now the FAA or you’re now the board of medicine or whatever it is. I’ve got to create that. The way we’ve created it is during the rehearsal, we read the letters. We show them, and I’m having everybody hold hands now and I said, now, imagine your loved one, which we’re going to intervene on tomorrow, is a wild horse in this corral. Now, how far are you willing to go to save your son’s life? How far are you willing to go to save your grandson? How far are you willing to go, and everybody, oh, right now, we’re all willing. I said, hang on there. I said, who’s he going to manipulate first? Mom. I said, drop your hand. The horse is out of the corral. I can’t do a thing for you. Don’t hire me because if you drop your hand and let this kid out, he’s dead. So if you drop your hand, the responsibility’s yours. I’m going to hold you responsible if you’ll allow me to. Oh, I’ll do anything. Okay.
So I hold hands, and I then tell them, the only three words I’ll let you use are wow, whatever, and oh, really when your son calls because he’s going to be mad. I want to come home. It’s the disease talking. I love you, call John. So I’m going to test you now, Mrs. Jones. Mrs. Jones, I’m your son now. Mom, if you don’t send me $500.00 I’m going to kill myself or, at least, the drug dealer will. And she says, wow. That’s the key. I’m taking over. Our company is now taking over. You’re out. All you’re going to do is read the letters. I’m going to listen to the now in the rehearsal. You’re going to be non-judgmental, and I’ll take them with me, and tomorrow you’ll read them, and that’s all you have to do. Whether he goes or not, I’m taking over, and I want to take over for the next five years. We’ll do it a year at a time, but I’m going to take over.
Now, if y’all are willing to do that, here’s the contract, and I want you to each sign it because I’m going to video it and I’m also going to tape it. I’m going to tape your words and in 45 seconds, that will be on my server, and I want you to know I’m going to hold you accountable or you hire somebody else. So I have them all sign it. I video it with my iPhone. I send it to my server, and I record it, and they all say, yes, I will. So that holds the accountability.
So now I’m building a licensee bureau, if you will, and I love the idea of the corral. They can understand a horse getting out and I want to saddle it so bad. I do go a lot of times and I’ll stand somebody on the chair and say, this is your son and he’s drinking and he’s getting real now. Who’s the first person, again, that holds their son up? Mom. Mom’s always the enabler, so I bring her over. Hold your son up. He’s getting wobbly on this chair. Who else? Well, dad, the employer, the friends, and I say, okay. How long is he going to stay up on that chair using? Forever as long as you’re an enabler. Once I get rid of all the enabling and you start listening to me and you listen to the process, we’ll save your kid’s life. I promise you that, but if you’re not part of this, please. You’re wasting your money with me.
So that gets that point across. So at that time, we sign the contract, we video it, and we send it in. Now we hold them accountable. That contract – I’ve got a staff in my office. I’ve got offices that call them, and when they come out of treatment, we’ll have the discharge summary. We’ll be doing their urines, their AA meetings, their NA meetings, their – everything else. In the meantime, folks, you, you especially, you’ve got to go to Co-Dependency Anonymous. I want you to pick up that phone right now, and you call this number, and I have them call two or three places to see what’s the first co-dependency workshop, and I make everybody that I feel needs it right now. Eventually the whole family goes. All of you are going to go to Al Anon two or three times a week ‘cause we are going to hold you accountable through this program, and anything else that you need, family counseling or whatever, and all of you are going to go to Family Week. The little kids 7 through 12 I want to go to Betty Ford’s Children Program, and they’re in Dallas and Denver and Palm Springs and I want those kids to go. You’ll save millions of dollars in counseling. This whole family has got to get well because you cannot take that person, as I’ve told you before, a leper out of a leper colony, put them in treatment, put them back in the leper colony and say, you know, don’t catch leprosy. So we’re going to hold all of you accountable. We’re going to hold the person that we’re intervening on accountable, and we’re going to hold you accountable. Everybody’s going to be getting into treatment and into recovery. If I can get this family into recovery, you’ll never ever spend money more wisely than that.
I don’t care whether it’s a person that has a license, doctor, airline, I could care less about that, okay? I don’t care who it is, we’ll help them. Now, if they don’t have a license, we have the program for you also, and that’s with Southworth Associates. So I don’t care what they do, the airline, the doctor, the attorney, the judge, your kid. It doesn’t matter, your sister, your mom. We’ve got the help you need, and if you can’t be accountable, then don’t call us. You can call us, of course, to get a referral, but we’re not the place for you ‘cause we do hold you accountable because we want success. We want recovery, and I really appreciate this, and I love to talk to everybody.
We’ve got a sad figure to tell you, where there’s 25 million of us with this addiction, which I have the disease. I’ve been sober 30 years, and from my best knowledge of this through my experience, only 1 out of 34 make it in the United States, and that’s sad. The reason the other 33 die is because they don’t have the resources or the people to do the intervention or the intervention person to get the person into treatment. That’s sad, so it’s about resources, usually.
Try us. If you don’t have money, I’ll get you some place that – we’ll get you a charity bed of some kind, but if you really want help, give us a call at 1-800-386-1695. If you want my toll free cell, it’s also 866-460-9014. Our website is Southworth associates, S o u-t-h-w-o-r-t-h, Associates, plural, spell it out, Southworthassociates.net. You can see on there we’ve been in business longer than anybody, and we’d be more than happy to help you in any case. Thanks.
