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Hey, everybody. Good to be with you today. My name is Charles Odell and I’m the chief executive officer and president of the Dilworth Center, and I’m also your host for these things that we do. This is called Chats with Charles. It gives me the opportunity to share with you things that may be on my mind or things that we’re up to here at Dilworth that we feel might be interesting to you. And we appreciate you tuning in.

You know, one of the things that I’m always getting asked about is what alcoholism and addiction are all about. You know, we refer to alcoholism and addiction as diseases. And this is something that’s been at play for many decades now. When I first got in the field, sometimes people would make comments like, well, you know, addiction may be a symptom of an underlying emotional or mental disorder. It’s not really a disease in and of itself. But, you know, if anything, it’s been thoroughly researched into this topic. And we know that alcoholism and addiction are primary illnesses.

They’re not symptoms of other underlying emotional or mental disorders. Now, that doesn’t mean that someone may not experience other disorders in conjunction with addiction. For example, many people may have true clinical depression in addition to addiction. And both of those illnesses need to be treated.

But, you know, we feel here at Dilworth that people who have addiction, people who have alcoholism, have illnesses, and they deserve to be treated with the same level of dignity and quality of care. Is anyone suffering from any other disease? These people are not bad people who need to get good. They’re sick people who need to get well and they deserve to be treated with the best care we can provide.

So here at Dilworth, we we take time to make sure that we’re constantly doing all we can do to make people’s treatment experiences here, not only relevant, but effective. We’re constantly striving to improve what we do, and we think we’re doing a good job. We’d like to hear from you if you have any questions or comments about how we go about treating alcoholism and addiction. Any questions that you may have specifically perhaps regarding a family or yourself, perhaps pick up the phone and give us a call. Shooting email info at Dilworth Center dot org. We’ll be glad to talk with you. Get back with you in a confidential and meaningful way. Thank you for tuning in today. I look forward to talking with you all in the not too distant future.