Shortage of addiction professionals

There’s a shortage of professionals with specialized training in addiction treatment. For decades the field of addiction treatment has seen this shortage developing as young people went to more lucrative fields, and there’s also a stigma still placed on addiction that turns people away from addiction treatment. Professionals who got into the field when insurance paid better than it has in the last decade or so are at retirement age. Now that insurance is again paying for addiction treatment there are not enough specialized professionals to meet the new demand.

Hopefully young people will choose to make a career in addiction treatment. I started in the field in 1983. It has been a rewarding journey. Old ideas about addicts being difficult to work with are not entirely true. Yes, it’s a demanding field, but if a person understands addiction, then it makes the challenges more understandable and less threatening. It certainly doesn’t get boring.

Most people are under the impression that recovery from addiction hardly ever happens, but recovery does happen quite often when a person can access quality treatment. Addiction treatment is not effective when the treatment is not well funded, or when the caregivers are not properly trained and when the treatment program is not based on best practices.

It still amazes me that insurance companies want to minimize resources spent on treating addiction when untreated addiction causes so many expensive medical conditions down the road. I think now that an opiate addiction epidemic is in the news, and opiate addiction is affecting people from all socio-economic levels, there will be more attention focused on quality treatment. I encourage young people who have an interest in caregiving to seriously consider addiction treatment as a career. It will one day be an important field of endeavor, because, as we see, the problem is not going away on its own. Untreated addiction causes way too many unnecessary deaths and drains way too many resources from our economy.