On the morning of Sept. 25, 1980, he heard his grown children enter his Baltimore home. John, then a 63-year-old man earning six figures, heard his daughter talking downstairs with his sons.
"My first thought was, 'If we're going to have a party, I got to get to a liquor store.' I was out of beer and liquor," says John, now 77.
When he came downstairs, he saw his children, his priest, an old friend and his wife. The first person to speak was his daughter.
"Daddy, I love you. We're all here because we love you," she said.
One by one, the group told John about his drinking problem -- how the daily pints of vodka and bourbon were eating him alive, how when they wanted to talk to him about anything he was usually sleeping off last night's drinking jag.
His family intervened.
A counseling creation of the 1960s, interventions remain a popular strategy used by family, friends and co-workers to gently and blamelessly steer a substance abuser into treatment before they self-destruct. Without warning, the person is confronted with his or her substance abuse problem in what is usually an emotionally charged event.
Days before Nirvana's Kurt Cobain fatally shot himself, the singer's family and friends held an intervention, according to newspaper reports. And, putting the ultimate stamp of cultural currency on the practice, a "Seinfeld" episode this year involved a substance abuse intervention. "It made 'Seinfeld' -- I don't know know how you can get more fashionable than that," says Dr. David Rose, a clinical psychologist in Towson who oversees interventions.
Thirty years ago, intervention was billed as an alternative to treating addicts after they had "hit bottom." In 1978, interventions made addiction-treatment history when former first lady Betty Ford underwent a successful intervention conducted by the man who wrote the book on intervention -- Vernon E. Johnson, an Episcopalian minister from Minnesota.
"Intervention always has some effect, and that effect is invariably positive. . . . At the very least, it offers a chance for recovery where before none existed," Mr. Johnson wrote in his 1986 book, "Intervention: How to help someone who doesn't want help."
"Instead of having these people die, we do this," says Dr. Larry Fishel, a therapist in Towson, who coordinates about 50 interventions a year. One lasted about seven hours. Most last about two hours.
The only goal of an intervention, Dr. Fishel says, is to get the person to agree to get help. It's not the time for friends and family to scold the person, he says. The surest way to ruin an intervention is to start blaming the subject, who will either leave the room or get so angry and defensive that he or she rejects any help.
"I edit out all the blaming words," says Jay Conner, a certified relapse-prevention specialist in Baltimore.
Based on Vernon Johnson's step-by-step process, Mr. Conner and other interventionists first meet with family members and friends who will be confronting the substance abuser.
"Get anyone who has power over them. If you have everybody there, the person has no place to run," Mr. Conner says.
They are asked to write about three incidents in which that person hurt or embarrassed them. They are coached not to threaten the abuser. "If you tell them, 'You will die if you keep this up,' they won't believe it, and they won't care," says Mr. Conner, whowill be confronting the substance abuser.
"Get anyone who has power over them. If you have everybody there, the person has no place to run," Mr. Conner says.
They are asked to write about three incidents in which that person hurt or embarrassed them. They are coached not to threaten the abuser. "If you tell them, 'You will die if you keep this up,' they won't believe it, and they won't care," says Mr. Conner, who oversees about five interventions a month.
After the intervention group is coached, the members confront the unknowing substance abuser, who simply shows up somewhere to meet them. Each group member recounts bad times caused by the person's drinking or drug use. The family secret is now exposed. The subject, who needs to be sober, also has to keep quiet during the intervention.
Participants speak of the adrenaline rush, the breathtaking drama and the emotional rawness of interventions. "The more tears, the more agony, the more pain, the better it is," Mr. Conner says.
After the venting, the group asks the person to get help immediately. If prepared properly, the group already has a treatment center in mind and on call. The idea is to give the person no time to back out.
In John's case, his family was prepared. John, who declined to give his last name because he's in Alcoholics Anonymous, where last names are not used, listened during his 1980 intervention but had no intention of going to any "funny farm. That's what I thought rehab was," he says. Anyway, how could he miss that much work? he thought.
John wasn't given a choice. On the day of his intervention, his family had packed his bags -- shaving kit and all. "They didn't pack much underwear, though," John remembers. They had already paid half the cost of a 30-day stay in a local rehabilitation center. They had even pulled a car around front.
John says that when your kids tell you they love you and want to help you, well, you get in the car.
He says that without intervention, "I think I'd still be a drunk."
Dr. Fishel roughly figures that 50 percent of his interventions are immediately successful. The abuser -- so defensive and angry in the beginning -- tearfully undergoes emotional epiphanies by the time the intervention is over.
Dr. Fishel says an additional 25 percent of his interventions work after about six months, when the person realizes, for instance, that his wife was serious, she did leave him -- or that his boss was serious, he did fire him. Realizing they were not idle threats, the abuser then gets into treatment, Dr. Fishel says.
The other 25 percent of his intervention patients keep denying they have a problem and keep self-destructing, he says.
Interventions shouldn't be used on some people. Mr. Johnson's book says lay persons shouldn't attempt an intervention on people with a history of mental illness; people who behave violently or erratically; and people who have been profoundly depressed for a period of time. In Kurt Cobain's case, the intervention obviously did not work. The 27-year-old singer reportedly had suffered from prolonged bouts of depression.
Some people are just too stubborn or narcissistic for an intervention to be attempted, Dr. Fishel says. In a recent Sports Illustrated, Mickey Mantle wrote that he was too hard-headed for a family intervention to have worked. Instead, the former New York Yankee great went on his own to the Betty Ford Clinic for his alcoholism treatment.
Interventions can fail when the intervening group doesn't live up vTC to its promises. If the abuser refuses to get help, he or she must suffer the premeditated consequences, counselors say.
"If the family isn't willing to carry out the consequences, it will make the conditions worse. The person calls the family's bluff," says Trish Gaffney, clinical director of Sheppard Pratt's Recovery Program in Baltimore.
"Some people say, 'I won't continue to be your friend' or 'I won't allow you to sit with your grandchildren because you have been drinking.' These are reasonable consequences," Ms. Gaffney says. "When
they are not carried through, it's the worst of both worlds. The person is put on the defensive, and you can't go back to acting like things are OK."
Some therapists, regarding the counseling technique as too risky, refuse to conduct interventions anymore, Ms. Gaffney says. She says therapists have received phone calls from angry intervention subjects, who wonder what business the therapists had talking to their friends. Some therapists have been threatened legally because they asked an employer to participate in an intervention. "The employer didn't know the person drank," Ms. Gaffney says.
However, Ms. Gaffney says 80 percent of her 20 interventions a year are successful. Take the case on March 2, 1987, in Baltimore.
Nana, then a 59-year-old woman living alone in Mount Washington, had been drinking a lot of scotch and beer for more than 30 days. Well, anything with alcohol in it would do, says Nana -- who doesn't want to give her last name because she's also in AA.
On that evening in 1987, Nana breezed into her favorite watering hole in Roland Park. One of her drinking buddies, Wayne, asked her to drop by his apartment for beef stew. She'd rather drink than eat, but Nana went along with him. "He looked so crestfallen."
When she got in his apartment, there was Ms. Gaffney from Sheppard Pratt, Nana's brother and his wife, and three of her close friends. There was no beef stew.
"It was a revelation to learn how much they all cared," Nana says.
Nana agreed to check in the next day at Sheppard Pratt's Recovery Program. But that night, after the intervention, Nana went into her kitchen, sat down and slowly downed a fifth of Dewar's.
"This will be my real celebration -- a toast to my upcoming sobriety!" she said to herself.
In the morning, Nana staggered into Sheppard Pratt for its
30-day program. "At 59, I started to grow up," she says.
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