by Caleb Fort
Daily Lobo
A UNM professor will join the ranks of Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld as the star of an HBO special.
Instead of comedy, Robert Meyers' show focuses on how family members can convince addicts to seek help.
"Getting an Addict Into Treatment: The CRAFT Approach" will premiere in Albuquerque today at 7 p.m. at the South Broadway Cultural Center at 1025 Broadway Blvd. S.E.
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The Community Reinforcement Approach and Family Training method of intervention is more positive than others, Meyers said.
"Instead of getting a bunch of people in a room and telling a guy that he's a schmuck and an addict, we tell them why we like them, what we want to do with them and what we want our relationship to be," he said. "We try to get them into treatment using a very slow rate of positive reinforcement. The simple explanation is that you get more flies with honey than with vinegar."
The episode is part of a 14-part series about addiction.
Meyers was originally scheduled to be a contributor to a single episode, but HBO chose to devote an entire part of the series to his
method.
"They liked what I was doing so much that they decided to focus on it for a whole 30 minutes," Meyers said. "It's quite flattering to be in it."
Meyers works for UNM's Center on Alcoholism, Substance Abuse and Addiction.
Interventions where addicts' friends and family gather to tell them that they need help operate under false assumptions,
Meyers said.
"People who abuse substances are not stupid people," he said. "They already know that they're in trouble with the law, or that their job is suffering or that they got drunk and puked on themselves. Why does a family member have to go and remind them of the negative things they've done?"
Meyers' method teaches family members how to talk to addicts when they are drunk or sober, and when they should suggest
treatment.
"We make an intervention a process instead of a single event," he said. "We can get more people into treatment before they actually hit bottom and ruin their lives."
Meyers said his method is three to four times more effective than other interventions at getting addicts into treatment.
He said the show will inform more people about his method.
"It's exciting to have a lot of people who are going to be watching this," he said. "I would like to get more people in the United States excited about doing interventions in a positive way."
