It's Not Okay to Be a Cannibal: How to Keep Addiction from Eating Your Family Alive

Today's top addiction consultants guide families devastated by a loved one’s addiction.

 As countless families can attest, addiction is a disease that destroys families, not just individuals. Secrecy, depression, anger, and confusion are hallmark traits of addicted families. Addiction wrecks the family's home life, consumes the family's financial resources, and depletes the family's emotional reserves. Now, having helped thousands of families confront addiction, two of the nation's leading interventionists, Robert Poznanovich and Andrew T. Wainwright, have created a survival guide for families. With compelling case histories and real-life scenarios, the authors set forth a practical course of action for families to break free from the grip of addiction, a process that culminates with an intervention for the addict. The process liberates and forever changes the family. Even if the addict refuses treatment, truth about addiction has been spoken during the intervention and the family is free to move ahead with or without the addict. In 2001, authors Andrew T. Wainwright and Robert Poznanovich founded Addiction Intervention Resources, Inc. (AIR), a national behavioral health consulting, intervention and recovery management company that provides solutions to families and organizations that are struggling as a result of addictions, eating disorders, and mental illness in their homes and offices. They specialize in alcohol intervention, drug addiction intervention, sex addiction intervention, gambling intervention, eating disorder intervention and other compulsive self-destructive behavior interventions as well as mental health intervention and crisis management.

Andrew founded AiR in 2002 and over the last decade he has built it into the leader of the modern intervention and crisis consulting industry. Andrew is a gifted interventionist trained by Dr. James Fearing, the direct successor of Dr. Vernon Johnson, creator of the Johnson Model of Intervention. With AiR Andrew has broadened the pioneering intervention approach of Dr. Johnson and Dr. Fearing to meet the expanding needs of families and patients across the behavioral health spectrum. The AiR Model of Intervention is now the standard of intervention practice today. Andrew and Dr. Savage, AiR’s Clinical Director, shared a vision that the Johnson Model of Intervention could be expanded to address a wider variety of behavioral health needs. To that end they created the AiR Model of Behavioral Health Crisis Management, the internationally accepted standard for all forms of behavioral health intervention in the world today. Andrew and Tom have spent the last decade training new clinicians in the AiR Model and redefining the role of intervention in the continuum of behavioral healthcare, education and advocacy. AiR, with Andrew as its guide, is constantly evolving, creating new services and solutions where none were previously available out of a genuine desire to be the most effective resource for anyone, anywhere who is faced with the burdens associated with chemical dependency, mental illness and eating disorders. Andrew has the knowledge, the experience and the team to make that desire a reality. In addition to over fifteen years of hands-on experience helping families struggling with addiction and mental illness, Andrew sought help for his own alcoholism and drug addiction at the Hazelden Foundation in Minnesota in 1995. Andrew is intimately acquainted with the systems of addiction and recovery. He has lived through them himself and he has helped thousands of other families recover. His work in this field has given him a wealth of experience, compassion and personal insight. Andrew is the author of It’s not Okay to be a Cannibal-How to Stop Addiction from Eating Your Family Alive, published by the Hazelden Foundation. This resource is widely regarded as the single best book on confronting addiction available to families today. He has trained many of the best known interventionists in the world. Today his volume of experience and insight has made him a frequent guest on CNN’s American Morning.