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I've had enough personal experience...friends/family, not me...that I'm willing to say that rehab is a swindle…They have an incentive to create repeat customers...Real rehabilitation is the producdt of a perfect storm.

I’m sorry to hear that some people close to you, your family and friends, didn’t get anything out of their rehab experience.

From personal experience, I know that the last thing that any honest rehab professional or volunteer ever wants to see, is the “repeat customer”. They have plenty of new people seeking help to not depend on their livelihood on repeat customers.

What they want really want is the success story who can come back and council the new arrivals on how it works and how to succeed in living clean and sober.

I’ve heard some people say the same sort of thing about cancer treatment – cancer researchers don’t’ want to find a cure because that would mean the end of their livelihood and so one shouldn’t seek cancer treatment, it’s a scam – I knew someone who had cancer, got treatment but still died so it can’t work and so doesn’t work for anyone.

When you say “Real rehabilitation is the product of a perfect storm”, that’s true in the sense that the person seeking treatment, whether from a rehab or AA, has to have a willingness to succeed and have hit a bottom low enough to make them willing. If someone enters a rehab only to appease a spouse, an employer or a judge, but is not willing to take the first step and admit they have a problem and is not willing to do what comes next in their recovery, they will fail. But that’s not the rehab’s fault.

>I’ve had enough personal experience...friends/family, not me...that I’m willing to say that rehab is a swindle…They have an incentive to create repeat customers.<

Rehab saved my life. What price do you put on that? The only swindle was the one I was committing on myself - denying what I knew was the truth for decades. Caramelgal - thanks for your experience, strength, and hope.