Betty Ford, the first alcoholic lady who opened rehabilitation clinics for women

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 one of the great defenders of women's health and rights. After leaving the White House, she helped reduce the social stigma that weighed on addictions and inspired thousands of people to seek treatment,” said former United States President Barack Obama on the day of her 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 the severe back pain she suffered, but her addiction to drugs and alcohol worsened in the following years, as she recounted in her autobiography.

At 60 years old, her daughter Susan Ford, seeing the severity of her mother's addiction, organized an intervention with close family members and doctors to whom Ford admitted her drug problems. She was hospitalized for months at the Naval Hospital in Long Beach. Ford was always very open about her condition. Her sincerity in talking about her problems was revolutionary at that time: a first lady admitted to having abused drink and drugs. “Hello, my name is Betty and I am an alcoholic,” Ford said when she participated in support groups. After her recovery, she founded the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California, in 1982, one of the first addiction treatment centers designed for women. Today it continues to be a global benchmark.

The Betty Ford Center was created under fundamental pillars that have later been adopted by other clinics around the world that have followed its legacy and treat their patients with a gender perspective. This is the case of the Oceánica clinic in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, Mexico. This is a private clinic specialized in the rehabilitation of addictions, codependency and other disorders. Oceánica was founded in 1991 by Jesús Cevallos Coppel in search of the most successful model of alcohol and drug treatment in the world. In searching for him, she contacted the Betty Ford Center, with which he established an alliance that lasted more than a decade. “Cevallos was also an alcoholic, like Ford, and that made them come together a lot to want to help more people fight their addictions, as they had done,” says the Clinical Director of Oceánica, Mario Gerardo.

So much so that Ford herself attended the inauguration of the rehabilitation center in 1993 in the company of her husband. This began to work mainly with the technology of the Betty Ford center. “We traveled a lot to the clinic in California to receive training on new advances in treatments with patients to implement them in Oceánica,” Gerardo recalls.

The model established by Ford is in turn based on the Minnesota model, which consists of a therapy based on the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and is used to treat various addictions, including substance abuse and alcohol use disorder. This multidisciplinary approach has since been emulated around the world. “In this model, addiction is seen as a disease. A treatable disease, but not curable,” explains Gerardo. Without a doubt, what makes these rehabilitation clinics special is that their treatments are designed with a gender perspective: “The programs are divided by gender and age,” they assure from Oceanica.

In his experience, Gerardo has been able to see how women have a very different way of acquiring addictions and dealing with them. “The basis of addictions in women is very different from that of men, as well as patterns of consumption and specific drugs of abuse.” Furthermore, the majority of women who come to the center have silent addictions because they cannot conceive of exposing themselves to stigma. “They postpone the fact of having an addiction and try to hide it. Sometimes, the family itself asks him to stop using and to take it in silence. In addition, they deal with much more guilt about leaving their home to receive treatment than men,” they say from the clinic.

In Spain, different rehabilitation centers have seen that there was a lack of a place specialized in the treatment of addictions in women. “Traditionally, an inequality gap has been generated from which not only the biopsychosocial particularities of addicted women (and in 84% of cases also abused) have been ignored, but also of the LGTBI+ group, which has its own patterns. consumption,” says the general director of the Cluster Guadalsalus, Luis Rebolo. From this rehabilitation center located in Seville they were able to realize that some clinics were not safe spaces for women. “In many women, the origin of their addictions came from traumatic events or anxieties related to sexual abuse or physical violence that they had suffered,” says Rebolo. That's where the idea was born less than two years ago to create a center with a gender perspective where we could create a safe space for women.

That is why they have two centers: one for men and one for women where they also welcome trans people. “Sometimes it is easier to get rid of the drug addiction than the abuser. We recognize the differences in consumption patterns between genders, as well as the particularities of their physical, psychological and social consequences. Our therapeutic intervention model with a gender perspective adjusts to these differences, ensuring more effective results,” says Rebolo.

Another center that has also focused on addiction rehabilitation for women is the Temehi Foundation, where they have been working since 2016 with women with addictions who have suffered gender violence in the past. “It is common to suffer abuse and for this to have the consequence that they start using substances due to what happened due to the abuse. There was no place where the two things were related in Spain,” explains one of the center's psychologists, Ana García. García adds that “due to social stigmas, it is less viewed for a woman to have addictions, and because of these prejudices, it is sometimes more difficult for them to accept that they have a problem. “Women suffer in silence and alone for longer.”

Although they do not consider that they are following the legacy of the Betty Ford Clinic step by step, they have been working for years to recover addicted women with the same approach created by Ford in the eighties. Ford described herself in her autobiography like this: “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 accidents of history I became an interesting person.”