Responsibility House
The beginning of a sober
life.
About Us
Responsibility House is a New Orleans area agency that assists people who are ready to make the journey to sobriety, stability, and health. Our programs are listed on the left bar of this page.
History
After
years of struggling to live as a junkie, Mike Martyn took the step that
he knew deep down he had to take if he wanted to live at all. It
was that first step to pursue treatment that placed Mike on the path to
recovery from addiction. Realizing how treatment had saved him from
destruction, Mike committed himself to helping those with a true need
for recovery.
Mike then set out to fulfill his dream
of operating and managing a substance abuse treatment facility that
would meet the recovery needs of the overlooked addicts in the Greater
New Orleans community. In 1994, Mike incorporated Responsibility House
and began offering a Residential
Treatment Program for men. Now he could give back to those who,
like himself, needed support in a time of crisis and motivation once
they'd made the decision to seek treatment.
Recognizing that the people in the
community needed support at an earlier stage of recovery, Mike opened
the Social
Detoxification Program. Running a social detox program allowed
Responsibility House to provide an alternative to the inpatient medical
detox setting for people without high medical needs.
After running Responsibility House for
almost seven years, Mike resolved to address the connection between
homelessness and substance abuse -- how one leads to the other. In
2001, Responsibility House began offering the Supportive Housing Program,
which houses the homeless and provides intensive supportive services.
This program allowed us to engage some of the most neglected people in
our community.
All along, Mike and his staff
understood that, like homelessness, mental illness often contributed to
substance abuse -- having two disorders can make them both worse. We
now offer a treatment model that addresses all of each client's
disorders at once. It's called integrated treatment, and we now even
provide training and
education in how to provide treatment that takes into account the
whole client.
With this knowledge and experience,
Responsibility House recently began offering outpatient
programs to fill another gap in the different levels of service
available to people in the community. By offering outpatient programs,
we can reach people who are coming into treatment and those maintaining
recovery -- and we can connect them all so that they can motivate each
other to succeed.
Today we are coming out of one of the
worst economic climates in decades, but Responsibility House will emerge
from this downturn still capable of meeting the needs of the people of
the New Orleans area.
How it became "Responsibility House"
Back in 1994 when Mike was filing the
paperwork to set up a substance abuse treatment agency, he ran into a
road block -- he was so focused on running the organization that he
hadn't really thought about a name. So he made a list of names, each
with "House" as the second word, like "Recovery House."
He called up the Secretary of State to
see which names weren't already claimed and to choose one. Well, as he
ran down the list, each and every name that he'd wanted was taken.
When he reached the bottom of the list
and ran out of names, he realized that he had no more ideas and sighed
and said, "OK, I'll take responsibility."
What Mike meant was that he'd own up to
the fact that he didn't have any more names for his organization. What
Mike heard was, "OK, you can have 'Responsibility House.' No one has
that name."
Mike hadn't thought of "Responsibility
House" as a name for his agency, but it represented his philosophy so
well that it just came right out of his mouth on accident, so he kept
it.
And "Responsibility House" stuck. For
16 years now, we've been Responsibility House, and we will be
Responsibility House for at least another 16 years.
1799 Stumpf Blvd., Bldg. 7, Ste. 4 | Terrytown, LA 70056 | Ph: (504) 367-4426 | Fax:
(504) 367-4486
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