Betty Ford died in 2011, but her legacy continues to help hundreds of women around the world who, like her, suffer from at least one addiction. “As First Lady, she was a great advocate for women's health and rights. After leaving the White House, he helped reduce the social stigma surrounding addiction and inspired thousands of people to seek treatment,” said former US President Barack Obama on the day of his death.
Ford was the First Lady of the United States from 1974 to 1977, when her husband Gerald Ford was the country's 38th president. She entered the White House taking prescription opioid painkillers for her severe back pain, but her addiction to drugs and alcohol worsened in the years that followed, as she said in her autobiography.
When her 60-year-old daughter Susan Ford realized the severity of her mother's addiction, she organized an intervention with close family members and doctors to whom Ford confessed her drug problems. She was hospitalized for months at the Naval Hospital in Long Beach. Ford was always very open about her condition. Her honesty when discussing her problems was revolutionary at the time: a first lady admitted to abusing alcohol and drugs. “Hello, my name is Betty and I’m an alcoholic,” Ford said as she attended support groups. After her recovery, she founded the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California, in 1982, one of the first addiction treatment centers specifically for women. It is still a global benchmark today.
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The Betty Ford Center was founded on core principles that were later adopted by other clinics around the world that followed its legacy and treat their patients from a gender perspective. This is the case at the Oceánica Clinic in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, Mexico. This is a private clinic specializing in the rehabilitation of addictions, codependency and other disorders. Oceánica was founded in 1991 by Jesús Cevallos Coppel in search of the world's most successful model of alcohol and drug treatment. In her search, she contacted the Betty Ford Center, with whom she formed an alliance that lasted more than a decade. “Cevallos was also an alcoholic like Ford, and that made them want to band together and help more people fight their addictions like they had,” says Oceánica clinical director Mario Gerardo.
So much so that Ford herself attended the inauguration of the rehabilitation center in 1993, accompanied by her husband. This began to work primarily with the technology of the Betty Ford Center. “We traveled a lot to the clinic in California to train patients on new treatment advances and to implement them in Oceánica,” remembers Gerardo.
Betty Ford at her addiction treatment center in Rancho Mirage, California in 1987.Bob Riha Jr. (Getty Images)
The model established by Ford is in turn based on the Minnesota Model, which consists of therapy based on the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and is used to treat various addictions, including drug abuse and alcohol use disorder. This multidisciplinary approach has since been replicated around the world. “In this model, addiction is viewed as a disease. A treatable disease, but not curable,” explains Gerardo. What is special about these rehabilitation clinics is undoubtedly that their treatments are designed with gender in mind: “The programs are divided according to gender and age,” says Oceánica.
Through his experience, Gerardo was able to see that women have a completely different way of developing and dealing with addiction. “The basis of addiction in women is very different from that in men, as are patterns of consumption and specific substance abuse.” In addition, most women who come to the center have silent addictions because they cannot imagine exposing themselves to stigmatization. “They suppress the fact that they have an addiction and try to hide it. Sometimes the family itself asks him to stop using it and take it in silence. “In addition, they feel much more guilty when leaving home to undergo treatment than men,” they say from the clinic.
In Spain, various rehabilitation centers have identified a lack of a specialized facility for the treatment of addictions in women. “Traditionally, an inequality gap has emerged that has ignored not only the biopsychosocial peculiarities of addicted women (and in 84% of cases also abused women), but also those of the LGTBI+ group, who have their own consumption patterns,” says the General Director of Guadalsalus -Group, Luis Rebolo. From this rehabilitation center in Seville, they could see that some clinics were not safe places for women. “For many women, the origin of their addiction lay in traumatic events or fears related to sexual abuse or physical violence that they had suffered,” says Rebolo. Less than two years ago, the idea came about to create a center with a gender perspective in which we could create a safe space for women.
That's why there are two centers: one for men and one for women, where transsexuals are also welcome. “Sometimes it is easier to get rid of drug addiction than the abuser. We recognize the differences in consumer behavior between the sexes as well as the peculiarities of their physical, psychological and social consequences. Our therapeutic intervention model with a gender perspective adapts to these differences and thus ensures more effective results,” says Rebolo.
Another center that also focuses on women's addiction rehabilitation is the Temehi Foundation, which has been working with addicted women who have suffered gender-based violence in the past since 2016. “It is common to suffer abuse and this results in them starting to use substances because of what happened as a result of the abuse.” In Spain there was no place where these two things were related “ explains Ana García, one of the center’s psychologists. García adds: “Because of social stigma, a woman's addiction is less likely to be recognized, and because of these prejudices, they sometimes find it harder to accept that they have a problem.” “Women suffer in silence and alone for longer.”
Although they don't believe they're carrying on the legacy of the Betty Ford Clinic step by step, they've been working for years to help recovering addicted women using the same approach Ford pioneered in the 1980s. Ford described herself in her autobiography: “I am an ordinary woman who had to go on stage at an extraordinary moment. When I became first lady, I was still the same as before. But through coincidences of history, I became an interesting person.”