Last week, we got a call from one of our sons with tragic news: his friend Joey had overdosed. He was 27. Sadly, this wasn’t the first, or even second, call from our children with such news.
As I sat next to our son at the funeral, I was again struck by the thought: this isn’t someone else's problem. This disease affects everyone.
Joey's grandparents, who raised him, said "he tried so hard to overcome his demons".
He spent over 13 years battling his addiction. Had Joey lived, he had a 50/50 chance of recovering, but odds are it would have taken him another 4 years, or 17 years total, to do so. It’s no wonder we’re losing so many to addictions.
One in five people struggle with an addiction. And there are 30% more overdose deaths since the pandemic.
If we were trying to manage anything else on the planet that affected the health of one in five people, we’d routinely screen for it, and not with tools that only support episodic care. Poor assessments lead to ineffective treatments and outcomes. And in Joey’s case, deadly ones.
It’s as if the rules for managing every other condition somehow don’t apply to addictions. We believe it’s a measurement problem, driven by stigma and an outdated paradigm.
These are the three things we believe are needed to solve the addiction epidemic: Identify more, treat better, recover longer.
Compris is a holistic, quantifiable, online addiction risk assessment. It integrates several validated screens into a disruptive digital tool that offers clinicians quick turnaround reporting, optimal level of care placement, targeted prevention and treatment, and measurable resilience progress. Compris identifies more people struggling with substance addiction, predicts risk, prevents onset, and promotes remissions with quality care tied to interval outcome measures.
Compris supports increased tele-health and alternative treatment access, and creates an unprecedented research and practice-informing database to accelerate our knowledge of how best to treat and manage this devastating chronic illness.
Providers, please sign up for a trial to help us end the addiction epidemic: dashboard.compriscare.com
Joey is another sad reminder of how little professional guidance and continuity of care there is when it comes to addiction management. It all just strengthens our resolve to do whatever it takes to improve the treatment and long term management of this deadly disease.
Thank you for your ongoing support.
Stay safe and healthy.
Joyce Ann and Calvin McGinn