You can find alcohol anywhere. Baseball games, grocery stores, birthday parties, work events, etc. It’s everywhere.
That fact alone – that drinking is such a widely accepted and even cherished vice – makes it all the more difficult for folks to quit, let alone acknowledge that they have a problem.
That’s where alcohol intervention programs come into play.
An intervention is designed to “shake” a person awake so to speak and open their eyes to what alcohol is doing to themselves and those who love them so much. It’s like turning a mirror on their addiction, forcing them to face something they’ve been avoiding or introducing formally to the problem for perhaps the first time.
Alcohol Takes a Lot of Lives
Alcohol is the third-leading cause of preventable death in the United States, unnecessarily taking around 95,000 lives a year according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA).
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put that number into further perspective by calculating that those 95,000 deaths equated to “2.8 million years of potential life lost (YPLL) each year in the United States from 2011 – 2015, shortening the lives of those who died by an average of 29 years”.
Globally speaking, 5.3% of all deaths – 3 million people – were attributable to alcohol consumption in 2016.
Signs Your Loved One Is Addicted to Alcohol
To that end, understanding the signs of an alcohol use disorder, the formal name for alcoholism, in a loved one makes it easier for you to help them.
- Drinks for longer than intended or having more than intended
- Wanting to quit or cut back but unable to do so
- Constantly intoxicated and spending an inordinate amount of time getting, drinking or recovering from alcohol
- Planning days around drinking
- Avoiding activities they once enjoyed because they can’t drink
- Strong cravings for a drink
- Continuing to drink despite the clear and abundant negative consequences
- School, work and homelife are suffering due to drinking
- Repeatedly and frequently blacking out
- Mood swings and irritability
- Building a tolerance so needing to drink more to get the same effects as before
- Denying a problem exists
- Weight loss
- Decreasing personal hygiene
- Pulling back from friends and family
- Drinking alone and/or at unusual hours like first thing in the morning
- Financial problems related to overspending on alcohol
- Legal problems due to crimes committed while drinking
- Engaging in riskier behavior like driving drunk
- Experiencing withdrawal symptoms when they stop drinking like insomnia, nausea, depression or anxiety
Of course, these symptoms will vary from person to person depending on how severe the addiction is and how long it’s lasted.
How Alcohol Intervention Programs Can Help Your Loved One Find Addiction Treatment
If your loved one, be it a close friend or family member, is exhibiting more and more of these signs over time, it may be time to take action.
The prospects of staging an intervention are understandably nerve-wracking and overwhelming which is why it’s recommended you do not do one on your own. Working with a professional interventionist like Footprints of Serenity takes the burden of planning and execution off you.
Working with a team who truly understands the process and can adjust in real-time based on previous experience is truly a game changer in terms of achieving the desired results of getting your loved one into addiction treatment.
In fact, a core element of putting an intervention together is assisting you in doing the research and helping you pinpoint a rehab facility that would best suit your loved one’s needs. The idea is to have that locked in and set up so at the end of the intervention they can choose change immediately.
The last thing you want is to convincingly make the case for treatment and then have to figure out the where and when. You want to be able to present them with a lifeline and have them act on it at that very moment.
Reach out to us to learn more about interventions and how we can help you find the right treatment for your family member or friend.