Drug and Alcohol Awareness: Alcoholism Is a True Disease Process

If you do not accept that alcoholism is a true disease process, you will need believe something else instead. What is that? What do you believe it is, truly. Here are the facts from 30 years of working in this field. The only way to get an alcoholic quickly pointing toward treatment is to hold them responsible for getting treatment when their disease become evident. In other words, you blame them not for the disease or drinking again....but for not getting into treatment. When you make this shift, you succeed very quickly. Do you see with this belief paradigm how important accepting alcoholism as a diease is? It is a myth that "rock bottom" must come first. More often, fear is what prompts or facilitates alcoholics to accept help or treatment. In DOT Reasonable Suspicion Training, you hold powerful leverage in the workplace.

• Fear of harm or death
• Fear of job loss
• Fear of losing a relationship
• Fear of hurting someone
• Fear of hitting rock bottom, whatever that might mean

The key to effectively managing troubled employees is understanding their fears and focusing on job performance issues such as absenteeism, behavior or quality of work to help both the workplace and employee.