LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WAVE) – You don’t have to go far to see how addiction is impacting our community.
Whether it’s drugs or alcohol, overcoming that struggle is hard, but ask people who have been though it and they will tell the journey is worth it.
BrightView Health is an outpatient addiction treatment center that helps patients achieve recovery from substance and alcohol use disorders.
“There is still a lot of education that we need to provide for the community,” Crystal Barajas from BrightView Health said. “This is not a choice. This is a disease and it does need to be medically treated as such.”
BrightView Health is serving a record number of patients recovering from a substance use disorder — more than 5,000 just in Kentucky. Since opening its first Kentucky location in 2020, BrightView has expanded to offer its addiction treatment program to Kentuckians in all regions of the state. With 17 centers, most residents in the Bluegrass state now live within 30 minutes of a BrightView center.
BrightView focuses on helping people through outpatient medication assisted treatment programs, counseling, group therapy, and social support. They offer treatment on demand.
“Someone can come in between the hours of 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. and can see a medical provider and clinician and get started with treatment on day one,” Barajas said. “It’s really important in this treatment space it’s vital that when someone is ready and they are looking for help that there is help available.”
Helping patients like Dana and Heaven.
“Even when things are tough, things are bad, you get up,” BrightView patient Dana said. “I don’t know if I could do it cold turkey quitting heroin the way I did,” BrightView patient Heaven said. “Suboxone saved my life.”
The good news, according to the CDC, KY overdose deaths were down 3% from 2022 to 2023. That’s better than the national average of 2.3%. BrightView credits the statistics moving in the right direction thanks to places like theirs and more people having access to naloxone which can treat narcotic overdose in an emergency situation.
“If you want it to be different for you, you have to make the step first that is coming in and really going through the steps and listening to what they have to say,” Dana said. “It may be hard to listen to it’s the first steps to getting to a brighter future.”
For more information on BrightView click here.
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