Deaf Treatment Program | Portland Rehabilitation Center
Imagine a world bathed in quiet: unsettling, dark, murky. This inky, frigid darkness envelops you, chokes you with its velvety touch. You scream, but all you feel is a faint vibration as your frustration is emitted into a tomblike void. Communicating your fears and anxieties is a stressful, uphill battle that rarely yields genuine empathy and advocacy. You scrabble frantically at the walls that insidiously muffle your attempts to escape. Your hopes grow feeble and dessicate as you swallow the painful realization your agony may never be truly grasped; nobody understands you because you are different, because you are viewed as an outcast; you are deaf and an addict.
Addiction is a lonely place, and can feel like a void, like the gaping maw that looms before the abyss. Addicts battle judgment, compulsion, instability, fractured relationships, behavioral and occupational struggles and the tumult of denial. The taste of a drink or adrenaline rush of a high is a juxtaposition – both euphoric and agonizing. The experience is isolating, fraught with fault lines threatening to break apart at any moment. Addiction is painful. It rips at the seams of a healthy existence and separates the addict from their true reality and potential.
Perhaps even more difficult is that lonely battle, fought even more courageously by our deaf communities. The deaf and hard-of-hearing are growing demographics in rehabilitation center. In Ohio, Wright State University (WSU) even offers a grant-funded project called Deaf off Drugs and Alcohol, designed to offer an accessible rehabilitation center for their deaf and hard-of-hearing community. The program also facilitates communication between medical providers and deaf and hard-of-hearing consumers. It was created in response to a growing need to provide quality rehabilitative options to consumers with disabilities – one that Lifeline Connections has chosen to pioneer in the northwest.
Our exclusive deaf treatment outpatient offers intake, remission and recovery options designed exclusively for consumers with hearing disabilities.
Through Lifeline’s Deaf Treatment program, we offer:
❖ Professionally conducted chemical dependency screenings;
❖ DUI assessments (we are licensed in Oregon and Washington);
❖ Group therapy with other deaf and hard-of-hearing patients;
❖ Individualized treatment plans based on each patient’s needs and goals;
❖ Medical interpreters certified in American Sign Language;
❖ Education to guide you on a path to sustainable sobriety;
❖ Training for real-world application, such as job skills and career placement assistance;
❖ Ongoing community support, advocacy and relapse counseling.
Our goal through this program is to offer a safe, comfortable environment where deaf patients can attain a clean, sustainable lifestyle through programs facilitated using effective communication strategies.
The darkness is palpable – but it does not have to define your life. If you are ready to explore options, reach out to our in-house program counselor, Mary Jacobs at the Portland rehabilitation center.
