Residential treatment has long been thought of as the gold standard of care for the treatment of addictive disorders and traumatic injury. While it has been and still is prudent to pursue residential treatment when medical detoxification or close psychiatric observation is required, it is not wise to assume that it will be the appropriate level or standard of care for you or meet the needs of a loved one. This is because residential treatment is not intended to be individualized.

Generally speaking, residential treatment programs have always designed the course in treatment to match the average number of days they could expect their patients’ insurance carrier to pay for. The typical patient’s length of stay was generally determined by a program driven model of 28 or 42 days. It is common that the therapeutic needs of prospective admissions are expected to be addressed by a “one size fits all” design; in part because of the fallacious expectation that all addicts or trauma victims are pretty much alike.

While each admission typically has an individualized treatment plan, the therapeutic interventions and modalities provided are the same for every admission. Every admission attends the same lectures, groups, recreational therapies and have the same number of individual therapy sessions per week – generally not more than 2 times per week. In other words, most programs offer “canned treatment” marketed as individualized care.