Residential Alcohol Treatment

Residential alcohol treatment can give you around the clock care.

While residential treatment is also commonly meant to be the same as inpatient, there are also some differences. These differences are usually in both the setting and the length of treatment. Sometimes inpatient treatment refers to shorter-term and a hospital setting, and residential signifies longer-term and more of a non-medical facility.

A resdiential program for alcohol abuse is often about a month long, but can also extend to 60 days, 90 days, six months, 12 months, or even longer. Although residential programs are not generally considered to be as medicalized as a hospital inpatient, they do typically have appropriate medical staff available, such as doctors, physicians assistants and nurses.

Residential treatment is often broken down into two main categories, 12 step and non-12 step, though this is a crude separation. The variations of treatments available now seek different practices being used on both styles of programs and the lines are continually blurred, with some facilities even offering some combination of both treatment guidelines.

The 12 steps come from the “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), which was developed as a recovery program back in the 1930’s and has helped many millions of people. There are AA support groups and meetings all over the world, which are often used as forms of aftercare upon completion of residential treatment for alcoholism.

Non-12 step residential programs have a very wide range of approaches, but are often more educational rather than clinical in nature. There are also a number of non-12 step aftercare or support groups that people can attend following residential treatment for alcohol.

One type of long-term residential treatment is something called a therapeutic community (TC). This is usually one full year or longer. Therapeutic communities are defined by the National Institute of Drug Absue (NIDA) as drug-free residential settings that use a hierarchical model with treatment stages that reflect increased levels of personal and social responsibility. Peer influence, mediated through a variety of group processes, is used to help individuals learn and assimilate social norms and develop more effective social skills.

Contact us for more information about different types of residential treatment opotions available for alcohol abuse. We’re here to help.