Clinic Les Alpes
Case postale 93
CH-1833 Les Avants
Switzerland

Centre Description

Location

In imaginatively landscaped grounds, Clinic Les Alpes sits in a stunning elevated position above the town of Montreux, in Switzerland, with a breathtaking 360-degree view over mountains, alpine meadows, woodlands and Lake Geneva.

Clinic Les Alpes benefits greatly from its situation in a country and region known for its efficiency, discretion, healthcare expertise and geographical accessibility. Indeed there are three airports within easy reach.

While offering the relief that comes from the removal of the pressures of daily life to a place that is both naturally invigorating and uplifting and – while being “away from it all” – is still easily accessible. Therefore it is easy for patients and their families to access the Clinic discreetly and to arrange arrival and departure without attracting unwanted attention.

In addiction the manned main gate leads to a safe and secure environment with one goal: to ensure our patients’ emotional, physical and mental wellbeing.

The Concept

A comprehensive service of exceptional quality that, with the utmost discretion, offers personalised treatment and a path to recovery. This is fully responsive to individual needs in a secluded and beautifully designed environment but one with all the opportunities. Plus resources and safety of an inpatient medical clinic, fully licensed by the Swiss Department of Health, where staff are multilingual and the primary language is English.

Conditions treated

Addiction

Basically the uncomfortable truth that people die from addiction or its effects is often overlooked. This certainly allows people to not take it seriously which means addiction wins. Undoubtably facing up to uncomfortable truths is where recovery begins.

We think that addiction is most helpfully understood as an all-consuming relationship with a substance or behaviour that is driven by more or less unconscious urges to change feelings, perceptions and experience. Specifically this relationship becomes self-perpetuating and results in a range of harmful consequences, thus affecting in time mind, body and spirit.

Addiction affects millions of people from all walks of life from all social, ethnic and cultural backgrounds. While people from socially disadvantaged backgrounds are recognised as more at risk of addiction, social advantage does not guarantee immunity. Certainly people from whatever background or social context undoubtedly deserve high quality help. Obviously a lack of good help can and will result in devastating consequences, regardless of social standing.

We think that addiction results from an individual attempting to heal but because this attempt chooses the wrong means, it therefore turns into its destructive opposite.

While sharing largely common characteristics, addiction manifests itself in a variety of guises (given that addictions are often substituted it is important to focus more on what they have in common than on their apparent differences) often in combination, including:

Substance Addictions:

• Alcohol
• Opiates: Heroin, morphine, prescribed drugs
• Depressants: Barbiturates, benzodiazepines, hypnotics
• Stimulants: (meth)amphetamines, cocaine
• THC: Marijuana, hashish
• Club drugs: MDMA, Flunitrazepam
• Inhalants: Nitrous oxide, glue, gasoline, cleaning fluids
• Hallucinogens: LSD, Mescaline
• Nicotine
• And others with problem use

Behavioural Addictions:

• Food / Eating disorder
• Gambling
• Compulsive sexual behaviour
• Compulsive buying
• Kleptomania
• Cyber addiction / social media
• Excessive risk taking
• Excessive appetite for work
• Co-dependency
• Pornography addiction

Burnout and Exhaustion

The term “burnout” alludes to an analogy between a person and an electric machine that “burns out” its circuit board when overloaded. Therefore in reality, a burnout is a type of nervous breakdown in reaction to an extreme emotional situation, for example after being overworked at a job or overwhelmed from a social, relationship or familial point of view. Also the adaptive capacities of the person decrease, as a candle consuming the last of its wax, and they have no more energy to continue. Biologically, neurochemistry, notably serotonin levels, can be perturbed and the brain just doesn’t function as efficiently.

For the general public the term “Burnout” is a euphemism for what in psychiatry is usually called “major depression” or “clinical depression”. Nonetheless a burnout can be something less severe, simply exhaustion. Evidently the individual only needs more rest or a vacation to recuperate; however, it can also be a much more serious affair, with significant and long-term consequences for the individual’s health and that needs to be treated and followed up very closely.

Mental and Emotional Wellbeing

People suffer a variety of mental health problems particularly burnout, depression and anxiety or somatic tension and pain.

In many cases, painful experiences in life’s formative years, including trauma, serve as unconscious obstacles to recovery if not recognised and addressed (a careful judgement has to be made in each patient’s case as to whether facing such underlying issues at this time is appropriate and will support recovery or will increase vulnerability to relapse).

At Clinic Les Alpes we work with our patients to identify these issues to develop plans for reducing impact and to build their ‘recovery capital’, the collection of social and personal resources at your disposal to support your recovery.

Our Approach

The Whole Person

Also Clinic Les Alpes will draw upon the principles of the Minnesota Model, which in turn developed as a professionally delivered treatment based on applying the principles and practices of Alcoholics Anonymous, it will provide a treatment programme that is sufficiently adaptable to enable an offering of individualised treatment and care. The option to participate in group activities and therapies will always be available and, indeed, encouraged.

• Our overall approach recognises and works with the continuous interplay between Mind, Body and Spirit in human experience.
• You are not solely defined by the condition and circumstances that brought you to treatment, even if those have come to dominate your life.
• If we (that is the staff and you in collaboration) focus on one aspect of your person, life or condition, your recovery may well fall short.
• In shaping your recovery, the influences of your current life and personal history does need to be identified, understood and addressed.

Individual treatment and care

We do not put you through a pre-set programme. We approach you as the unique individual you are.

While our approach will never be formulaic or standardised, we do draw on tried and tested therapies  we think will work for you; always working collaboratively with you and being prepared to adjust the approach as we go along.

We start by getting to know you well and building trust so that we can work effectively together. This is the essence of a creative therapeutic relationship.
We will listen carefully to what you want to achieve.

Working closely with you individually, the lead therapist will, with the help of the medical and therapeutic team, construct the clearest possible picture of how addiction is affecting you and those close to you. We draw on our experience and expertise to help you map out and establish a recovery that is entirely your own but one that we agree has the best chance of lasting beyond treatment.

We will help you put in place the support needed to sustain recovery beyond Clinic Les Alpes.

Our Role

Recovery is yours and it is waiting to happen. We cannot give it to you or make it happen to you or for you. It is something that, with the right circumstances and approach, happens within you and comes to be owned and managed by you. So we focus on what we can do; that is, to create the right conditions to enable you to connect with and embrace recovery.

We see our role as to provide you with a safe, contained as well as a professionally conscientious and caring space in which, with a personalised approach, we work together:

• To understand you as an individual in the context of your current life
• To understand what has brought you to seek help now
• To understand and assess your personal goals
• To recognise the potential obstacles to you making meaningful change and achieving your goals
• To help you to discover how to move with purpose beyond those obstacles, optimising your resources for recovery
• To support you to do so by drawing on all our knowledge, experience and resources, as well as remaining open to the possibility of new approaches
• To help you establish and practice personal recovery behaviours, mind sets and attitudes in the short term that will serve to develop your wellbeing over the long term

Abstinence

Apart from appropriately prescribed medications, Clinic Les Alpes is an alcohol and drug free environment.

Therefore Clinic Les Alpes will offer an abstinence-based approach to achieving a sustainable recovery, although it will not be rigidly dogmatic. Also the judicious use of medications will be determined purely by clinical necessity. Plus you will not be withdrawn from medications for which there is a current or ongoing clinical need. Hence the clinical protocols for managing withdrawal will be of an international standard and ones that have been tried and tested over decades.

Abstaining from addictive substances or behaviours is the starting point of treatment. It is most certainly not however an end in itself.

Simply not doing something is not very appealing. It is about not doing something in order to allow and enable something positive to happen: recovery and all the good that comes with it.

There is a very practical point to abstinence. Without the distorting interference of the substance or behaviour, the person is more clearly revealed, including to themselves. It is possible to assess whether a variety of mental and physical symptoms in evidence on admission were purely associated with active addiction or might exist any way. Some symptoms disappear while others come into clearer relief. In a sense there is a truer picture of the individual following withdrawal.

Aftercare

The patient will incorporate the principles and practices acquired while in treatment into everyday life beyond the clinic ensuring the availability of and access to ongoing support to sustain their recovery. Preparing the patient to follow through on treatment gains will be carefully addressed in aftercare planning. also maintaining a connection to the clinic, including return visits for refreshing the commitment to recovery, will be offered.

Aftercare planning will, wherever possible, involve the family.

Prior to discharge the patient is given another thorough health check to measure progress against the baseline established at the outset of treatment.

Families

Family relationships are generally disturbed and often come to be determined by the demands of addiction. Addiction can become the organising dynamic in family relationships. The all-consuming nature of addiction is revealed in the way it affects families both as individuals and as a whole.

Family members suffer a range of psychological and physical symptoms arising from their relationship to addiction. That is why we say, you don’t have to be addicted to a substance or behaviour to suffer from addiction.

Families are treated as of peripheral importance. Not at Clinic Les Alpes. Families need help and support in their own right as well as in relation to a loved one in treatment therefore we have family therapists on our staff.

Some family members will opt to join our brief residential programme or attend on an out-patient basis.

Please follow the website button above for further information. Also you can use the email button or telephone to ask Clinic Les Alpes any questions directly