My friend is currently at her second 'rehab' center... The first one was a disaster for her because all they did was go to 12-step meetings, and charged her $25

My friend is currently at her second 'rehab' center... The first one was a disaster for her because all they did was go to 12-step meetings, and charged her $25,000 or $30,000 for the month. Talking about drugs all the time is a good strategy to get an addict to want to use drugs. She didn't last very long at that place before she relapsed and they sent her back to the psychiatric hospital, who decided that they'd clearly made an error in allowing the tranquilizers to lapse. Tranquilizers do not treat poor diets. Her current center specializes in "dual diagnosis". This is the fraudulent diagnosis that pretends that patients' psychiatric diagnoses are of no relation to their tendency to self-medicate with the street pharmacy. Really this second place just gets their clients "stabilized" on their psychiatric medications and hauls them around to daily 12-step meetings. My friend is doing better now because I went to the courts to try to get the treatment provider to explain why they had her on double-doses of tranquilizers, when my phone videos clearly prove that she was fine before she got assaulted with Haldol ("anti-psychotic") when she ran out of alcohol [1]. Sometime doctors do good work, sometimes they make work for themselves. [1] http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/289848-overview http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/289848-overview : Alcohol-related psychosis spontaneously clears with discontinuation of alcohol use and may resume during repeated alcohol exposure. Distinguishing alcohol-related psychosis from schizophrenia or other primary psychotic disorders through clinical presentation often is difficult. It is generally accepted that alcohol-related psychosis remits with abstinence, unlike schizophrenia. If persistent psychosis develops, diagnostic confusion can result. Comorbid psychotic disorders (eg, schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders) and severe mood disorder with psychosis may exist, resulting in the psychosis being attributed to the wrong etiology. The only thing the current treatment center gives my friend is "structure" and an expectation that she needs to be sober. She's doing well now, in spite of the anti-treatments, because my court cases motivated the treatment provider to take her off the worst of the psychiatric drugs. Maybe Abilify is the least-bad of the anti-psychotics, but it is known to cause new problems for many patients [2]. [2] Abilify drug blamed for compulsive gambling, eating, shopping, sex - http://kdvr.com/2017/02/15/abilify-drug-blamed-for-compulsive-gambling-eating-shopping-and-sex/ http://kdvr.com/2017/02/15/abilify-drug-blamed-for-compulsiv... edit: All drug treatment businesses are "shady", to some degree. What the industry needs is to move beyond the 12-step program, which is rooted in the 1930's approach to alcoholism. There are aspects of the 12 steps that are helpful, but it's very important to address the biological problems that now are known to be associated with people's tendency to self-medicate. Just yesterday I read of a study that used some chemical to 'extinguish' cocaine cravings... Naltrexone is FDA-approved for alcohol abuse, and prevents people from getting high on opiates. Effective approaches to addiction need to be investigated. A good first step would be to stop treating these people like criminals.