As an addiction counselor or someone walking down that path, you are already well aware that there’s a substantial cost to treating substance use disorders. Beating those demons requires medication, counseling, healthcare, and occasionally even in-patient therapy stays. Since you need to eat, and so do all those other professionals, it can’t be done for nothing.
In a perfect world, healthcare insurance or social services agencies would ensure that people get the care they need and that professionals get paid for delivering it.
But that’s not the world we live in. According to the American Medical Association and the American Society of Addiction Medicine, 90 percent of people who need substance abuse treatment don’t get it.
For many, the major obstacle is simply the cost of treatment. But a new trend inspired by higher education funding may help you, or others, past that tar pit of debt: drug rehab scholarships.
How Much Does Substance Abuse Treatment Cost? – The High Costs of Having a Normal Life
According to the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics (NCDAS), as of 2023 the average cost of drug rehabilitation per patient is $13,475. The least expensive medical detox program costs nearly $2,000, but comes without the support that is often so critical to success.
The cheapest in-patient rehab programs cost $6,000 per month, and even outpatient treatment is $5,000 for three months of counseling.
But even that can undersell the total financial burden for different types of addiction and therapies. Methadone treatment, for example, can by itself run to over $12,000 per episode. Adult residential stays are typically close to $10,000. As programs get higher and higher on the quality ladder, some people end up shelling out close to $20,000 for a 30 day inpatient stay.
Particularly for anyone on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, exactly where addictions hit hardest, those numbers might as well be the cost of landing on the moon.
Add to them the fact that most people will require at least two and often as many as five attempts at recovery before experiencing remission, and the scale of the fiscal wall that stands between them and help becomes clear.
Even For Patients Who Don’t Pay the Full Tab For Addiction Therapy, Costs Can Be Steep
For those who are fortunate enough to get into the system, social services and government programs can cover a lot of the infrastructure and organizational costs of treatment. The total cost of detox spread across the population, according to a 2016 study cited by NCDAS, is some $8.6 billion, or around $141,000 per person.
While the direct costs of substance abuse treatment can seem astronomical, the cost of leaving addictions untreated would be utterly devastating to society.
Individuals and families are fortunate they don’t have to come up with all of that out of pocket. In some cases, their insurance will pick up some of the tab. But that can still leave many thousands of dollars owed to therapists and treatment facilities.
Scholarships can help them recover from addiction without becoming crippled by financial hardship.
How Do Scholarships for Substance Abuse Treatment Work?
The concept of a drug rehab scholarship is pretty straightforward for anyone familiar with scholarships in general: it’s an award for a certain amount of money, made to individuals in need of addiction treatment services for the purpose of paying for those services.
Like a college scholarship, there are different origins, qualifications, and amounts involved in substance abuse treatment scholarships. The organization or agency that grants the scholarship gets to decide factors such as:
- What sort of addictions it can cover
- What kind of services it can be applied toward
- The ethnic, financial, experiential, and other personal details of individuals who are eligible
- What form the money is granted in
- What the timeline is for applying for and receiving the funds
In general, the process to receive one of these grants is to:
- Search for opportunities for which you or your client may be eligible
- Fill out and submit applications for the scholarship (this may include submitting proof of financial status, letters or recommendation, or essays alongside basic personal information)
- Wait to see if the scholarship is awarded
- Apply the funding toward treatment programs
Scholarships are almost always needs-based, and may require that you demonstrate that you have exhausted your other treatment financing options, have been seeking treatment for a certain amount of time, or pledge to remain in a program for a certain period.
For obvious reasons, drug rehab scholarship grants are almost always made directly to treatment facilities rather than to the recipient. So there can be some addition coordination and paperwork involved to ensure that the money is applied to the proper account.
Addiction Counselors Have an Inside Track in Looking for Drug Rehab Scholarships
If you are a counselor looking for scholarship awards for clients, it’s likely that you are interested in finding options that will help to pay for your own services.
You have the advantage of coming at your search from a calmer, more knowledgeable place. In fact, a degree in addiction counseling will prep you with coursework that discusses the human services system in the country and goes into detail about how the bills get paid.
So you will have a stronger idea of the options, restrictions, and availability of scholarship programs that can serve both you and your clients… starting with understanding who grants those scholarships in the first place.
Where Can I Find Drug Rehab Scholarships?
While maybe the biggest single source of scholarship grants for college tuition is the federal government, they aren’t a significant player in drug rehab scholarships.
Instead, the most common source of scholarship funding in substance abuse treatment is from individual treatment facilities themselves. In keeping with the larger mission of rehabilitation, even for-profit clinics may have means-tested scholarship awards available for some patients.
Other scholarships for addiction therapy are awarded by non-profit organizations. In turn, many of those groups are funded by government grants, such as the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant from SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration).
You’re more likely to find these kinds of scholarships offered for inpatient therapy. Since inpatient stays are more expensive, there’s a greater need for financial assistance. Individuals in outpatient treatment may have more luck finding programs that are within their budget, or subsidized, in the first place.
How Much Treatment Do Grants and Scholarships for Addiction Therapy Cover?
Scholarships are awarded across a wide range of dollar values, and addiction therapies similarly exist at a lot of different price points. So it’s not a stretch to say that a grant or scholarship for addiction treatment can potentially cover the entire cost of some therapies.
Typically, those aren’t going to be at the high end of the market, though. Since scholarships are aimed at people with few other options, the priority is on getting them the most essential treatment, not the cushier options like acupuncture, massage therapy, or high-end accommodations.
The Challenges in Finding Scholarships for Substance Abuse Treatment for Both Counselors and Clients
Because of the nature of grants and funding sources, these types of scholarships tend to come and go. That makes them hard to find online, since information is often outdated.
Many organizations that once offered scholarships are now pulling back from doing so considering a much tighter fundraising environment. The Clean Cause Foundation, for example, which once offered dedicated recovery housing scholarships to individuals, has redirected efforts to direct support of recovery homes instead.
An innovative non-profit called 10,000 Beds has a scholarship that pays for bed space nationally at in-patient treatment partners, but found so much demand that it stopped accepting applicants in mid-2024 and is working down the waitlist today.
This is an area where local knowledge is paramount, which gives well-trained addiction counselors an edge. You’ll have the expertise to evaluate programs and clients. You’ll also have the connections to know where opportunities are available.
Other Options Beyond Scholarships and Grants for Drug Rehab Financial Assistance
If scholarships covering drug rehab are tough to find and extremely competitive to receive, patients should know they aren’t the only option for receiving financial assistance.
Frequently, patients in such dire financial straits qualify for Medicare or Medicaid assistance in rehab. Addiction counselors have a lot of experience working with the system and may be able to point clients toward resources for getting enrolled in those programs.
State-run facilities often offer free treatment. Qualified addiction counselors have the local knowledge to understand the human services landscape in their area.
And no one has given up the fight on the non-profit front, either—funding is still flowing to treatment, even if it’s not through direct scholarships. In fact, in some cases, such as with the Clean Cause scholarships, the funding that was going to individuals has simply been redirected to some of the same organizations that money would have ended up with anyway.
Although your patients won’t see it as a direct contribution to their own treatment, it will still have the effect of lowering the total costs for therapy.