Amber Hollingsworth (speaker) explains how involuntary commitment for drug and alcohol problems typically requires proof of imminent danger to self or others (suicidal, homicidal, severe psychosis), and so is difficult to obtain solely for substance use. She describes the hospital evaluation process (designated examiners, a short 3–5 day hold for evaluation) and cautions that short involuntary holds rarely cure addiction. Hollingsworth advises that securing the person’s voluntary agreement to enter treatment (via interventions such as an "invisible intervention") is usually the most effective path.
Chapters
For those of you out there who are wondering if you can get someone committed to treatment who has a drug and alcohol problem, I'm going to explain that process to you today, but before I do that, I want to let you know that it's probably not the answer to your problems. And by the end of this video you're going to understand why. Basically, if you're over the age of 16 years old, it means you have to give consent to go to treatment. That means mom and dad can't sign you into treatment without your permission. You have to say, yes, I'll go. And that gets pretty complicated when you have a 16, 17, 18, 19 year old kid who's got a major drug and alcohol problem, who's reckless, who's destroying their life and yours, and you're desperate and you want to know what to do. So many families want to figure out how to get their loved one into treatment. They want to know how to get them committed. So basically to get committed to treatment you have to show an imminent danger to themselves. So someone has to be imminent. That means immediate danger to themselves. And that's really hard to show with drug and alcohol. You can show that someone's reckless, that they're doing stupid things, but it's really hard to prove that they're imminently immediately going to kill themselves if you don't put them in treatment. It can be done. Most of the time when people get committed to treatment, it's for being suicidal or homicidal or some kind of severe psychosis where they're really, really, really out of their mind, delusional and they have to be kept safe. You can get it done for drug and alcohol reasons. It's just hard. So for example, you may have to show that a mother is everyday driving around drunk with her kids in the car, or that someone's in such bad medical condition that they are nearly about to die because of their drug use. The thing you need to understand about this is that if you get someone committed to treatment, what happens is usually the person shows up in like the emergency room for some reason and a doctor and a nurse or a doctor and a social worker will come and talk to the person and or sometimes their family. And if you could explain to them what's going on, they'll call a judge and see about getting the person committed to psychiatric care. What they're really doing is they're getting them committed for an evaluation period. And in this state they say it's a minimum of three days in the hospital where I used to work, it really was. We had five business days to evaluate the person and then make a recommendation to the court. So they're really officially just committed and held for evaluation for that short period of time. Let me promise you, five days will not cure an addiction. It can be helpful if someone is an immediate danger to themselves to get them stabilized enough to hopefully have a chance to talk some sense into them and get them to continue treatment where they are or somewhere else. But if all you're gonna do is get them held for five days, they're gonna come right back out and you're gonna be in the same problem again. So, yes, you can do it. It's kind of difficult. You have to be able to give clear evidence that they're immediate threat to themselves or others and just know that they're probably not gonna be held longer than about a week, and that's probably maximum. When I used to work at the hospital, I used to do some of these examinations. So after someone would land in the hospital, they appoint two people called designated examiners. And those people have to evaluate the person and make a recommendation to the court. And unless the person was telling us, yes, I'm going to go kill myself or someone else or I mean, they were seriously, seriously reckless, and you could put prove it, they were going to get released after those five days. And in most cases, even on the rare, rare occasion where they get held past that, they still have to be evaluated in a few more days. And you have to go through the same process. And almost everyone that's in the hospital is smart enough, even a kid, to figure out what they need to say to get released. And you can't go to a court and say, yeah, but I know they're lying. So all you have really is what the person is saying and doing. Most people know what to say and do to get out of that situation. But I do want you to know, if it's an immediate dangerous situation, then you need to tell the story to the physician or whoever's seeing them. If they'll talk to you, you've got to give them every single piece of information. If you want to have a chance at getting something, your very best bet is actually to get someone to agree to go to treatment themselves. Now, they don't have to go running and skipping and happy about it, but they do have to agree to go and sign themselves in. There's lots of ways to get that to happen. A lot of times you have to leverage people into treatment. And in some of my other videos, I'LL go into how that at Hope for Families, we use a process called the invisible intervention. There are other types of interventions, but the key is just to get someone to agree to go. It doesn't matter how they go. Just getting them to agree to go raises your chances that they'll actually put some work in and be successful and get some actual real recovery.
