Leo Miller, Vice President of Clinical Support Services at the Haymarket Center, has more than 30 years experience helping people overcome addiction.
Today, he spoke with Perspectives’ Working World Café about his past experience as an internal EAP, why businesses should engage an EAP to help employees with issues like addiction, and his own road to alcohol recovery and leadership.
WWC: Hi Leo, thanks for speaking with us as a part of Perspectives’ Recovery Month Q&A series. I understand that you’ve had a remarkable career in addiction services and employee assistance programs (EAP). Let me see if I can capture all this in one breath:
Since first working as an addiction treatment volunteer in 1978, you have worked for several Catholic Charities organizations, a privately held addiction recovery center, spent 15 years as an EAP for Chicago hospitals, more than two years as an airlines’ internal EAP and then you joined the Haymarket Center – the largest treatment center in a single location in the US – where you still help people today.
What inspired you to follow that path?
LM: Well, I happen to be a recovering alcoholic myself. I got sober in 1977. Before that I was in sales for eight years and was very successful at it – but then drinking had an impact. My last year in sales was my worst for commissions. Then I realized, through the help of others, that I had a problem. I didn’t go into treatment, but I did get involved in self-help. That set me down the road I’m on now.
WWC: How did you get from there to being a counselor and EAP?
LM: At first, I took a manager position at a restaurant chain here in Chicago. I thought it was a demeaning job and I hated it. But every time I was going to quit people encouraged me to stick with it, and I did, and I would get promoted. I was very successful at it.
While I was working that job, I was also going to self-help meetings. And then I started volunteering at Alcare Detox Center every Friday or Saturday night for about three years, to talk to the people that were in the program there. A great guy that ran the program said “most of the people here aren’t going to make it. They’ll feel better – even if it’s only temporary – and they’ll leave.”
But I felt like I was helping people and I wanted to do more.
So, even though I was already counseling people, I had no educational background in it at the time and I really wanted to fix that. I started going to seminars and started learning all these great ways to help people. I was willing to get the degree, get certified and then get an advanced degree, and I did it – and I’m forever grateful for those opportunities. But I think understanding addiction also helped me a lot. Some people, like many social workers, learn a lot about counseling but not addiction.
WWC: You have a lot of incredibly moving stories about people that have been touched by addiction, but why should businesses care about having an EAP in place or mitigating issues like employee addiction?
LM: This is not an isolated illness; it permeates all aspects of society. About 70% of our total population drinks and about 10% of people (adults) who drink have a problem. That’s about 21 million people that need treatment. Sooner or later many of these people will need to stop drinking or drugging. That is best accomplished if they are still working and an employee assistance professional intervenes. That person can use treatment, self-help or both.
And it’s not just about that individual. Alcoholics affect coworkers, absenteeism rates, family members, overall work performance, insurance costs – the list goes on.
Take into consideration that the average cost of an emergency room (ER) visit is about $1,000 – or as much as $2,200 here at one hospital in Chicago. Then think about an alcoholic going to the ER 3-4-6 times a year and those costs. Then tally up the costs of someone having to cover for them at work when they call in sick. Then add the costs of lost productivity when they’re at work but not fully functional…
Or, think about the cost of accidents if that person works at a warehouse or in construction. Consider your workers comp costs or lawsuits…
At the end of the day, every $1 you spend productively treating alcoholism saves you $7 somewhere else.
WWC: Can you give us an example of a business that has benefited from seeing an employee through recovery?
LM: When I worked for a hospital, I easily saw at least one nurse every 5-6 weeks that had a problem. I’m saying that about 70% of those nurses are still working as nurses today.
There’s always a nursing shortage so keeping them working is an important issue. Some came to me about their husbands drinking or drugging, or other issues and it would turn out that they had a problem too – I would always leave the door open for that, and it worked.
The same goes for hospital technicians, physicians and others with special training. The cost of having an EAP in place to help them is incredibly reasonable.
WWC: Do you think that businesses “get it”?
LM: Every business needs to realize that you’re only as good as the people that are there.
One time I was talking to a renowned neurosurgeon about a guy who had a brain tumor that was going to affect his balance or kill him if it was malignant. The surgery was going to take 6-8 hours – brutal – but it was 100% successful.
When I congratulated the surgeon, he said, “Don’t thank me. Thank that whole room of people. I didn’t do this by myself; it was a whole team – shifts of people prepping everything, managing everything, backing me up. I get the credit – and I like to hear that things went well – but it takes all of us.”
It’s the same with business. You take a risk with your money and if you have an entire team of people, you need strong supervision and leadership so that everyone can pull together to do the best possible job and enjoy success.
Business likes to blame the worker instead of saying “what is acceptable job performance” and holding people accountable to that. Sometimes one supervisor lets you slide while another doesn’t. Supervisors need to be good managers of people so that when a problem arises you can say, “No, your absenteeism is not acceptable.”
Companies that do that successfully are 1) productive and 2) save lives. EAPs help companies deal with their employee’s personal issues; keeping those issues from affecting job performance, and thereby saving money.
WWC: Are there different types of EAPs that are better at dealing with issues like addiction?
LM: You get what you pay for. If your company gets a free EAP as part of its health or disability insurance then you’re not going to get the same level of service.
As an internal EAP, my job was to assess and refer. An employee with marriage trouble, for example, might be better off with 3-6 months counseling; then see if you can apply what you’ve talked about before you go back to counseling.
As a good EAP, you want to send them to somebody that can help them help themselves. Not everybody needs long term counseling. A good EAP can assess that.
WWC: Any final thoughts you’d like to share with our readers?
LM: I’d like to remind businesses that the value of employee assistance is not just helping employees deal with problems, but helping management be better leaders. EAP is a great resource that can help you do that.
Tags: addiction, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, EAP, Employee Assistance Program, Haymarket Center, Leo Miller, national alcohol and drug addiction recovery month, recovery, treatment
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