Intervention specialists say the only pleasant intervention is the one that doesn’t work. Interventions, when you think about it, can’t help but be hard: The nature of addiciton…the nature of addicts…means that any attempt to conduct a meaningful intervention is bound to be traumatic. But make no mistake: It’s worth it. An intervention done right is an intervention that saves an addict’s life, that helps him recognize the fact of his addiction, and helps him admit the the truth of his impotence against it. That process is never easy. It can’t be. But again, it’s worth it. My intervention saved my life. It’s as simple as that. There’s no other way to phrase, no other way to think about it, even. If it hadn’t been for that intervention, I wouldn’t be here writing this. Someday, if you’re lucky, someone you care about will be able to say the same thing. For you own sake, act now. No, it won’t be easy…but the things that most need doing very rarely are.

Depression treatment gave me myself back. It sounds corny, I know…but there it is: Depression treatment gave me my life back. Let me start living like I’d used to, before depression came along and made me hate the world. I couldn’t tell you where I’d be, today, without depression treatment. And frankly, I’d rather not think about it.

Depression is, obviously, an overwhelming disease. It will break you down, eat away at you from the inside. To be a victim of depression is to live in a world that’s hardly worth the effort. To get better in a depression treatment center, on the other hand, is to remember why you’d ever even bothered in the first place.

Depression treatment can work for you, if you let it. The road is long, and the way is rough…but you really can get better, provided you commit yourself to the depression treatment process. I did…and it has made all the difference. Don’t think a day goes by that I don’t thank God for making me so lucky.

I was hooked on painkillers for the better part of two years. Or so they tell me. Point of fact, I don’t remember much of anything about my painkiller addiction…except perhaps the Need, and the sense that I couldn’t ever get enough of whatever it was I wanted.

Painkiller addiction…like any kind of drug addiction…is serious business. Addiction to painkillers ruined my life: chased away my wife, alienated me from my kids, cost me my job. When I woke up, after all those years, it was like everything I’d cared about was gone, like everything I’d ever known had been some kind of dream, dissolved into Nothing as if it had never been. It isn’t, obviously, the kind of thing you get over overnight.

If you or someone you care about has a painkiller addiction problem, please: Get help. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Don’t think it’s all right to just to “let it go.” That’s what I thought. And I let go of more than I ever bargained for.

If you don’t get alcohol treatment, you won’t get better. Period. That’s the only important truth, if you or someone you care about has succumbed to alcoholism: You can’t get better without alcohol treatment, or outside of an alcohol treatment center. You need help. And alcohol treatment is the last best chance you’ve got.

If you don’t get alcohol treatment, you won’t ever get back to living life the way it ought to be lived. You will never rediscover your dignity, or your capacity for hope. You will never rediscover that person you used to be, before alcohol addiction turned you into a shell of anyone you’d ever thought you were.

Please, for your own sake, make today the day you start making alcohol treatment work for you. Some things are too important to put off until tomorrow. Your future…your life…is certainly one of them. Alcohol treatment really can work for you, but not before you seek it out. Remember, no one can take the first step but you. Don’t wait any longer to finally start walking.

I’d have been a goner, if it weren’t for rehab. I was dead. Deader than dead. So dead it’s a wonder I was ever even alive at all. Before rehab, during the Unpleasantness, I was a shell of anyone I’d ever been or wanted to be. I lost my wife. I alienated my friends. I couldn’t hold a job for more than a few weeks. I was, well…I was a goner. And I guess that about says it all.

Rehab, so you know, isn’t easy. It never is. It can’t be. Rehab works by turning addicts into New People, by helping them learn new ways of engaging with themselves and their world. The typical rehab patient can’t Function, as they say, without resorting to drug use. If you’re going to get sober…if you’re going to stay sober…rehab has got to help you break that dependency. Short of that, you can’t ever hope to be anything but gone.

Rehab for worked for me. The fact that I’m here, writing this, is nothing short of miracle. And believe me: Not a day goes by that I don’t drop to my knees and say thanks. For rehab. For healing. For the second chance I got from my rehab program, when everyone who knew figured I was well past saving.

I can’t imagine how any gift would have ever been more worth getting.

There are no shortcuts in drug rehabilitation. There is no easy road to recovery, no quick way to sobriety. If drug rehabilitation is going to work for you, you’re going to have to work for drug rehabilitation. And make no mistake: You’ll never get a better return on an investment.

Successful drug rehabilitation will give you your life back. Successful drug rehabilitation will help you rediscover yourself as you used to be, and the world as you used to know it; successful drug rehabilitation will quite literally give you a second chance, which is all any drug addict could ever really ask for.

Again, though, you’ve got to work for it. Drug rehabilitation healing doesn’t happen. Drug rehabilitation patients don’t just get better. There is, in the end, no substitute for effort in the drug rehabilitation process: effort unfailing and unflinching; effort directed to a goal that should need no elaborate justification. For your own sake, for the sake of the people who care about you, don’t wait another day to start doing the right thing.

Alcohol rehabs don’t work miracles. It’s not as if alcoholics check into alcohol rehab centers and then magically get healed. That would be nice, of course…but no: Not quite. The truth is that alcohol rehabs can only ever be as successful as their patients make them.

Life in alcohol rehabs isn’t easy. It isn’t passive. Patients in alcohol rehabs only get better by virtue of diligence, and hard work; the successful alcohol rehab patient is invariably the one who commits himself to the process, and engages with his own healing. Short of that, no alcohol rehab program in the world can do anything for you.

The best news about alcohol rehabs? They really work. Patients in alcohol rehabs really do get healed: really do rediscover their pride, and their dignity, and all the rest of those emotions that make life worth living in the first place. Beyond that, it’s hard to imagine how any other truth about alcohol rehabs could ever be important.

How important is drug treatment? It will save your life, if you let it. Or, it will save your life if you help it—and part of that helping is and had got to be an act of regenerative suicide, a process by which you lay waste to one version of yourself so that another you…a better a you, a you cleansed by the rigors of drug treatment…might be brought into being.

If drug treatment is going to save your life, in other words, you’ve got to die and be reborn again. Anything less just isn’t good enough: not with so much to lose, and not with so much to win.

Drug addicts go to drug treatment centers to get healed. They also go to drug treatment centers to get killed. If you’re a prospective drug treatment patient, may you find the strength to let that old you rest in peace from now until forever.

The success of your drug treatment program depends on it. And nothing could ever be more important than that.

It can happen to you. That’s the dirty secret about drug abuse, and drug addiction: It can happen to you. And if it does, the only chance you’ve got lies in a drug treatment center.

People don’t like to talk about the ubiquity of drug addiction, and drug treatment center programs. In polite circles, addiction is routinely discussed as someone else’s problem, as the sort of disease that could never afflict that most revered and inviolate of all human constructions: Me.

The truth, unfortunately, is another story entirely. Drug addiction really can happen to you, same as it can happen to anyone. And you, just like anyone else, don’t stand a chance of beating it outside of a drug treatment center.

There are by some estimates as many as ten million drug addicts…prospective drug treatment center patients…in the United States. They are rich and poor, black and white; they come from wealthy neighborhoods and privileged backgrounds as surely as they come from the gritty-hard cradle of the streets. They are regular people, those ten million drug addicts: people like you and me and any of us, people who got caught on the wrong side of a disease they never saw coming.

Pity any one of them who doesn’t get the help he needs from a drug treatment center. And pity the self-assured fool who can’t learn from their example.

The worst response to drug addiction? Not talking about it. The fact that no one ever told you drug abuse could happen to you doesn’t mean it can’t. And the fact that no likes to discuss drug rehabs at cocktail parties doesn’t mean they aren’t essential to the healing process.

In fact, drug rehabs are the last best chance any addict could have to get sober.

Drug recovery doesn’t happen outside of drug rehabs. It just doesn’t. If you or someone you care about has succumbed to addiction, the sort of care offered by professional drug rehabs is absolutely vital to your future. Please, for your own sake, don’t wait another day to start getting healed.

Do patients enjoy themselves in drug rehabs? No, of course not. Drug recovery is an arduous process, and no one gets better without suffering a little along the way. But believe me: It’s worth it. Drug rehabs, again, are the last best chance any addict could ever have. That’s more or less the only lesson that could ever be worth learning.