Is Sober Living The Right Level Of Care?

Hey, guys, Chris Edrington here from Cadre with another nice one for you. I'm going to talk about levels of care. People refer to the levels of care in our industry a lot in an, in an attempt to assess how high a level of care that you need at the moment or your loved one needs. So when it comes to sober living, it gets a little bit confusing because sober living is typically not a clinical atmosphere, not licensed. There are no licensed professionals, so it doesn't really apply in terms of a level of care.

Although a counselor from your treatment center might say to your kid or to you or your wife, we're recommending this level of care for you when you leave here. So let's just keep this specific about what level of care am I getting recommended to when I'm leaving treatment, or my friend or my brother, my uncle, my dog, my sister, my daughter, whatever? Typically there's primary treatment, acute level care, residential. You live there for a month or more, and that's as high as it gets before, aside from the emergency room, so to speak, in terms of acute level leaving treatment, often counselors will make the recommendation that you continue some kind of treatment, typically outpatient, that does not include the housing component.

That's where sometimes sober living comes in as a combination between sober living, outpatient, and together, that can mean a certain level to a clinician making a referral. In other words, that's a higher level recommendation than if you just go to a sober house. Now, this is layman's terms. These are not clinical, necessarily clinical terms that are viable inside of a billing for an, to bill an insurance company through. You can use your insurance for outpatient. And a lot of people refer to it as IOP, which just means intensive outpatient.

There are two levels in some people's worlds, intensive outpatient and just outpatient. And all that means is less hours a week, and that means your insurance company pays the outpatient clinic less money. So billing codes gets into this and makes it confusing. Generally speaking, if your loved one or you are leaving treatment, getting a level of care recommendation, it's going to depend on what they can find for you, what you can afford, what your insurance company will pay for, what you're willing to do.

I have sober living in St. Paul, Minnesota, and typically people don't come here in January for sober living. Kind of obvious why. So the client may make a decision based on location just because they don't want to be in that part of town or that part of the country. That's really got nothing to do with it. The recommendation in terms of the level of care is what I want to focus on because I don't want there to be any confusion that you're actually complying in terms of getting that level of care or not.

In some cases, people have to comply with a certain level of care. In other words, the court is saying, or a commitment, someone's on a commitment and they're saying you have to be in this level of care for this long in order to satisfy your, the drug court or something that you're on. So that's where it can get a little bit complicated. But by and large, recovery residences, which is an umbrella term for all kinds of different sober livings, is the housing component. Right. It's just where you live, where you eat and sleep and hang out, and you can go from there to a clinic during the day or in the evening.

For outpatient services, all outpatient means is you don't live there. I often get referrals from treatment centers looking for a little bit higher level of care than a typical sober house kind of doesn't really exist. I have a program called the plus program that kind of fits that niche, but I'm not doing an advertisement for that at the moment, so we'll leave that there. There are kind of conglomerations, I guess, is the wrong, the right word or sort of unique sort of structured programs that can meet a certain level of care.

But by and large, it's probably, you're probably going to add some clinical work to the housing component to get the level you're looking for. So if your person or you are looking at leaving treatment and your counselor starts talking to you about level of care, we recommend for you, they might recommend you need more treatment, which means you leave treatment and you laterally stay at that level and go to a different treatment center for a different issue or more of the same, and you haven't changed level of care.

If you go straight from treatment home with no other services, you've gone down as far as you can go. If you leave treatment and you go to a sober house, you're a little bit better than living at home because you're in the middle of the social model help. And that is, there's therapeutic value there. It's not clinical, but it's therapeutic and it's helpful and it's a great thing. And it's a higher level of care than just going home. Just anecdotally, really. If you leave treatment, you go to a sober house and you go to outpatient, you've hit sort of the sweet spot there because there really isn't a lot of options.

There used to be a lot of transitional care or extended care programs. Sometimes years ago. They used to be called halfway houses, but that term really belongs to the prison population, and they sort of took their name back several years ago. But these extended cares, which was treatment light, you lived there, but you could work and leave during the day, but you still lived at the treatment center at night, and you had to follow the rules there. And there were a lot of them. Those have gone away largely because insurance companies don't want to pay for you while you're sleeping and eating, going to the gym or in the bathroom.

They just, they want to pay for you when you're getting treated. So they cut out the housing part, and they only pay for the treatment part, which means you can go there and get treated, but you can't live there. So that's where sober living combination of sober living and outpatient comes in. And it's more and more and more and more popular all over the country. Outpatient clinics opening sober houses, silver houses opening outpatients. And we have a whole lot of people in that game right now. That's not to say there's anything wrong with that.

It's actually a really great option if you put it together right. It's even a good option for someone who might have been to treatment in the last year and relapse, and they can back up to that level and not all the way back up to primary acute level care. So there's, there's good stuff here. What I'd like to do is be helpful about any confusion about when your professional says something to you about level of care and you have to meet a level of care, it kind of gets confusing about, well, what does that actually mean?

If you're in this situation or someone you love is in this situation, find somebody who knows what they're talking about. Clinicians know some of it. Sober house operators know some of it. There's a bunch of case managers out there, independent operators like me, and I know several of them, and they know all the lingo and they know all the potential options, and you can put together what will be. And this is the best. This is the part I like the most about the recommendation of what you should do in your recovery is I want to increase the likelihood that I'm going to stay sober or my son is or my daughter is.

What is the best option that increases that likelihood that I can afford. So it's more likely that you're going to stay sober. If you're in a town full of other sober people, where there's a big sober community, that's one. It's more likely that you're going to stay sober if you're in a sober house, that's well run. And if you want, I'm going to make another video about how sober houses are operate or how they're operated. It's more likely you're going to stay sober if you stay engaged, period. Engaged in outpatient, engaged in AA, engaged in your sober house.

If you disappear, live alone and disengage from your recovery plan, then you're just sitting at home thinking the s*** out of yourself and you're getting nowhere. So that's the opposite of. That's the lowest likelihood scenario. So we want to increase the likelihood. We want to take what we can afford, what the individual is willing to do, and we can take the best combination of those things we can get. So when you hear level of care, don't be thrown off by that, because it really just means a demarcation of how much help are you getting at this level.

So you've been in primary recovery or primary residential treatment because you needed acute level care, right. You just came off the street, you're literally still soaked in alcohol or drugs, and you have physical withdrawals going on and mental stuff going on. And it's likely, it's largely triage to where you come down to where you're calm and you can have a conversation, you make some decisions about your life, and that's the acute level. Most of the recovery experienced, like where the real lifestyle change comes from, is in the social model level after treatment.

So if there's where the investment, if that's where we're going to grow the most, and let's invest the most in that level, and that's where we get to make a lot of choices about, well, it's more likely that I'm going to stay sober if I get away from my friends and I go this town instead of that town, or if I can go to a place that's nice and I, and I can be accepted by the people. And like I said, I'll make a video about sober houses and how to pick one. But for this, this level of care issue gets people stuck sometimes.

And I wanted to make it clear that there are a way. There's. It's an easy way to see through it. If you just talk to somebody who knows what they're talking about, I hope this was doing helpful again. Lots of really great, lived, experienced individuals. Super good looking people, by the way, on Cadre. Very attractive. Very attractive. So sign up, sign in, check it out. I hope it helps. Till next time.