Drug and Alcohol EAP Intervention Services

Understanding The Importance of Intervention Within the EAP Community

In regards to Drug and Alcohol EAP, Intervention Services often gets contacted by affected friends and family members about loved ones who are addicted and in living in highly distressed situations. Sometimes, these are the “Enablers” themselves who do not know what to do or who to turn to for help. In the cases where the addict/alcoholic is not the direct contact, intervention is one of the most important aspects in the process of recovery. There are many misconceptions by family, friends and persons within the EAP community.  There is also a lack of knowledge about interventions and how they can benefit all parties involved. The purposes of this article are to identify the importance of Drug and Alcohol EAP Interventions and when it is necessary or should be considered.

Identifying When an  EAP Intervention is Necessary

When is an intervention necessary? Families often come to the EAP community looking for help for a loved one, be it someone that is working for the company or a family member of. Clinically, the first response is “lets find them a treatment and get them admitted as soon as possible.”  This often leads to the family trying to do an intervention in some form or another. Family intervention rarely if ever works with the desired outcome. In fact, the percentage of successful family interventions is lower than 10%.

This is an opportune time to look into referring an intervention out to the proper authorities. With a 90% placement rate, intervention is by far the most successful way to get and addict or alcoholic into treatment. For the EAP community the implications of getting someone into treatment are tremendous. The benefit comes in productivity. If an employee is worried about a family member, there would be a constant worry about that family member and their productivity levels would decline.  Once the intervention is done and they are placed with a 90% certainty, the employee’s mind is set at ease and can once again raise their productivity level. 

On the other side, it is the employee themselves that has the issue.  Family members can call the EAP looking for help. The usual outcome is to keep an eye on that employee to see if they are having an issue. The next step is to say “go to treatment or else.” At this point the employee is of course going to say “yes” because they do not want to lose their job. The conundrum is that the employee is now going into treatment for someone else and not for the most important person, themselves. Statistics show that when a person goes into treatment for someone else or another problem, that they do not achieve long term sobriety. It is well know by the EAP community that going into treatment for oneself is one of the most important aspects of recovery. When that employee returns with a solid root in recovery they can once again become a productive member of the organization.

If you are an EAP program or a family member looking to perform and intervention using EAP within your company, please contact us.

What is an intervention and how does it benefit the family, employer, and alcoholic to achieve long term sobriety?

There are three main intervention models. The Johnson model has been in practice the longest. This as most EAP’s know is a confrontational model to point out all the negative consequences the addiction has caused under the assumption that this will break their denial and get them into treatment. On the other side is the Invitational model.  This consists of educating the family and the addict at the same time. The philosophy behind this is that if the addict cannot get individuals one on one then they cannot manipulate them and the disease cannot win. The problem with this method is getting the addict to actually show up. The third model is the systemic model.

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For an EAP, Interventions can be effective methods to help an employee

An intervention is a process used to get educate the family and help them make the necessary changes to understand how addiction not only affects the alcoholic/addict but the family as a whole. Its purpose is not to just get the alcoholic/addict into treatment but to transform the thought process of the family.  They need to understand their role in the addiction. There is often feelings of guilt and remorse on the family’s part. “What did I do to make my loved one this way?” “Why cant I help my loved one?” The truth of the matter is that often times the family is just as sick if not more so than the addict themselves. This is why intervention is important. The education process of the intervention targets the family member.  They need to understand the manipulation that is brought about by the addict/alcoholic. They also need to understand their part in the enabling process. 

If you are an EAP provider and are looking to help integrate intervention services as a part of your employment assistance programs, Intervention Services has been helping employers with EAP interventions for over 10 years.