Serving the People of Hawaii Since 1960        

Whatever Happened To "Do The Right Thing"?

When I was receiving my advanced training for work in the substance abuse field I was fortunate to have had the influences of Sid Kline, Dick Welsh, Jim Hopkins and Johnny Holt.  These influences, I believe, were most important as I learned about the point of convergence that exists between business related decision making and clinical decision making.

By the time I met these fellas they'd been successfully helping others recover from addiction for a combined total of more than 100 years.  They'd also been running a treatment environment for 25 years and had helped thousands of human beings reclaim their lives.  While their lack of experience with addiction to substances other than alcohol caused them frustration at times, it in no way limited their desire to do their best to help.

These men would often tell me that, in helping others, all you had to do was to remember to   "keep it simple" and "do the right thing".

Keep It Simple.  Do The Right Thing.  For a big part of my life I was way too bright and way too driven to perceive a coherent plan for interacting with others in those two statements.  Even today I can, on occasion, be "sucked up into the sky and spun around" by a fast talking operator intent on picking my pocket or getting me to compromise my values and beliefs.

I think that unless a person is hypervigilant, and fiercely well grounded, we're all susceptible to compromising our values and beliefs for some suggested or imagined "greater good".  As a species, we want to believe.  We want to believe that what we are doing is good.  We want to believe that what we are doing is moral.  We want to believe that, even if our actions make us feel just a little uncomfortable, our motives are pure and our intentions are good.

In the treatment field we often find ourselves dealing with seriously damaged and maladapted people.  People who's condition and conduct scream alienation and disenfranchisement.  The dope fiend has no constituency.  The addict has no voice.  The chronic alcoholic has no back alley ombudsman to ensure that his issues and his concerns are given a legitimate hearing and that he is fairly treated, as all citizens have a right to expect. The dope fiend has "advocates" and "agencies" that, all too often, exist to provide employment for victims of academic inertia or for people on their way up, or down, the ladder of a social services career. 

People who may or may not have experienced addiction, may or may not have experienced homelessness, may or may not have experienced domestic violence, may or may not have known hunger, may or may not have had their children taken from them, may or may not have lost everything worth living for, may or may not have contemplated or attempted suicide, may or may not have accidentally caused another's death due to their illness, may or may not have been imprisoned, people who are probably not functionally illiterate and who may or may not have lost years of their lives due to inappropriate, ineffective and non-responsive treatment for their illness, delivered by people who may or may not have cared.

An important element in care giving is the ability to relate to another's pain.  When one can "feel" what another, who is suffering, must be feeling, one of the most beautiful aspects of human nature is to want to truly help end that person's suffering.  Not to truly want to help, but to be compelled to help in a manner that will genuinely lead to an end of that suffering.

There are many very sweet and kind hearted people who truly want to help, but who lack the visceral insight into the causes, and the bitter memory of the hopelessness, misery and despair of these conditions.  Helping hearts which lack an irrepressible moral outrage at sleight of hand treatment services, will often allow their efforts to be directed by "experts", board members, administrators and bean-counters who focus on the bottom line. 

Those "experts", board members, administrators and bean-counters, who maintain a "sanitary distance" by putting as many closed doors as  possible between themselves and our fellow citizens.  The very people whose pain and suffering the funding is intended to alleviate.  I'm talking about desk-bound experts who will work their entire careers in the "treatment field" and never sit down with a suffering human being and feel that person's pain, feel that person's confusion, feel that person's fear and try to help that person find peace.

I don't want to give the impression that there are not wonderful human beings involved in all levels of the treatment field.  I know such people and am grateful for their examples of courage and commitment.  I also understand their sadness and frustration when they are forced, by those others, to mislead or abandon a patient who is not ready and who will not make it.  I understand the corrosive effect this has on their spirit and I share in the shame that is felt when any care giver is told, "Discharge the Patient, you have done all you can do" and they know it's a lie.

Unfortunately, there are too many cases of blind adherence to "operating policies and procedures" which fail to take into account the misery that is being allowed to continue for too many innocent, trusting human beings.

I've worked in the treatment field for some time now.  I've seen changes in how services are funded, I've seen changes in how services are delivered.  I have seen it all.   I am so grateful I knew Sid and Dick and Jimmy and John.  Their examples of selfless service, of truly caring for the person who was suffering, their willingness to do whatever it took to get the "right" help to someone who was lost, had a deep and lasting effect on me.

I believe the lessons that were learned, by our veterans of W.W.II, had a great deal to do with the moral strength, and the unyielding determination to help those in need, that manifested in Hawaii in the 50's and 60's.  We take care of our own!  Go For Broke!  No one gets left behind! Points of honor, born on the battlefield, that were carried home for the benefit of all who came in contact with these good men.

I watched.  I listened.  I learned.  I learned of the deep honor bestowed upon an individual when another asks for help.  I felt the humbling responsibility one assumes when agreeing to "serve" another.  I discovered the satisfaction one receives from "the forgetting of self" and from the act of investing one's energies and attention in the betterment of another human being's condition. 

I realized that when one of us is suffering, we all share in this suffering. I also learned that the inability, of some among us, to perceive this shared pain does not diminish the burden of shame and sorrow that settles on us all when we fail to act in a manner that will truly end that pain.

It's hard these days.  "Experts" running around the country proclaiming the inevitability of relapse.  Managed care.  The unabated suffering of the people looking for help.   Permission being given to undertreat, squeeze the resources and make wild, disjointed referrals that leave the patient bewildered and defenseless.  We're going through a tough time and everybody knows it.

This too shall pass.

I've seen an evolution in the treatment of addiction.  I noticed when the spin-drys found their voice and found ears that would listen.  I watched as political favor was curried and policies were established that would diminish the genuine care that our fellow citizens would receive, while increasing the payment that the spin-drys would receive for providing that diminished level of care.

This was wrong.

Do we let it stop here?   Is this the rational balance we've all worked so hard to achieve?  Is this the best our patients, and their loved ones, can hope for?  Are we going to let this be the best and highest response our society can make to the people needing our help, or will we demand that this evolution continue until all, who need help, get legitimate, effective and responsive treatment services?

We need to stop confusing ourselves about what's going on.  We need to look into the eyes of our Patients.   We need to rediscover that which brought us to the helping field.  We need to acknowledge the pain we feel when others attempt to prevent us from doing that which, morally, should be done.

We need to stop using jargon and making excuses and rationalizing and justifying the hurt that we are ignoring and the pain that we create when those, who do not feel, demand that we do not feel.

When the Founders of our various organizations established a place and a way for their fellow human beings to reclaim their lives, they performed an act which elevated our common human dignity.  This act was recognized by society and determined to be worthy of support.  Others recognized that, with the addition of that support, there was money to be made. 

The intervening years have shown us that moral courage needs to be nurtured and exercised in order to stem the spread of common greed and the exploitation of those who lack a common voice

You know it.  Maybe you've been afraid to say anything, but you've felt it. 

For the sake of our patients, and for the treatment field to survive, we have to re-establish these concepts.

Keep It Simple!   

Do The Right Thing!

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Last modified: June 11th, 2003