Southern California is a beautiful place with ideal weather conditions almost year round. Orange County is one part of Southern California that is known for its mainly affluent residents and safe neighborhoods where people raise children who go to college and go onto successful careers.
A lesser known part of Orange County is the growing drug problem among the community’s young population. High school students are using heroin and prescription painkillers to the point where a countywide intervention is needed. Parents, who have worked hard to create a good life for their children, are angry and upset that drugs have made their way into their lives.
Orange County’s unique rehab culture is addressing the growing problem of teen and young adult drug use. The approach is also appealing to people who live outside of California.
California for Substance Abuse Treatment
As mentioned, the weather in Southern California provides an attractive addition when looking into rehab facilities. If a young person has a choice between spending several months in a cold and snowy climate versus a warm beach community, what do you think he or she will choose? Located right on the Pacific Ocean, treatment centers in Southern California can offer a wide variety of outdoor activities to its clients.
In addition to weather, climate, and location, Orange County’s unique rehab culture also includes some of the top-rated substance abuse treatment professionals in the world. California, as a state, is known for successful rehab because of the people it attracts. If a treatment center is doing well, and the staff recruits someone known for helping addicts heal, that is another great counselor who is assisting clients in Southern California, and even more specifically, in Orange County’s unique rehab culture.
What Do Addicts Need to Stop Using and to Start Healing?
Dr. Samuel Woodward was the medical superintendent of one of the first public hospitals that treated mental illness. In 1833, Dr. Woodward said, “Let the experiment be fairly tried; let an institution be founded; let the means of a cure be provided; let the principles on which it is to be founded be extensively promulgated and, I doubt not, all intelligent people will be satisfied of its feasibility;…let the principle of total abstinence be rigorously adopted and enforced;…let appropriate medication be afforded;…let the mind be soothed;…let good nutrition be regularly administered-this course, rigorously adopted and pursued, will restore nine out of ten in all cases.” The quote was used in the book Uppers, Downers, All-Arounders in the chapter entitled Treatment.
What if the world of drug and alcohol treatment, and the attention given to mental illness, had listened and had been treating the whole person from the start? The prevalence of self-medication for depression may not have lead a person to alcoholism, for example.
Orange County’s unique rehab culture includes many of the ideas that Dr. Woodward suggested. Holistic approaches to healing are combined with more traditional forms of therapy to treat the whole person, but in a way that is personalized to each client.
Kate Green pursues her passion for helping others with addiction treatment as a quality improvement manager. Learn more about her work and various treatment programs at Balboa Horizons.