The thing that stops working people getting treatment usually isn’t money, and it isn’t denial. It’s the diary. Four weeks is a long time to be missing from a job where people notice.
So here’s how it actually works for the solicitors, tradespeople, nurses, teachers and business owners we treat.
You’re allowed to be ill
Addiction is an illness, and time off to treat it is sick leave, like any other. Your GP can give you a fit note. Your employer is entitled to know you’re off sick and roughly for how long, not the clinical details. HR doesn’t need a diagnosis to process an absence.
We’re not lawyers and this isn’t employment advice. But the fear most people carry, that asking for time off means announcing what it’s for, is usually worse than the reality. Talk to your GP first. Their job includes exactly this conversation.
(One honest caveat: under the Equality Act 2010, addiction itself isn’t treated as a disability, although conditions that come with it, like depression or liver disease, can be. If your role is regulated, medicine, aviation, driving, financial services, there may be reporting duties that apply to you specifically, and you should take proper advice on those rather than guess.)
Two weeks, four weeks, or around the job
Not everyone can disappear for a month, so the sensible question is what’s clinically right and actually possible.
- 14 days is often enough for a supervised detox plus the start of therapeutic work, and it fits inside most people’s annual leave without a conversation.
- 28 days is the length most programmes are built around, and it gives the therapy time to do something that lasts.
- One-to-one counselling in person or online, is the option for people who genuinely can’t step away yet. It’s a real option, not a consolation prize, though if your body is physically dependent, detox has to come first.
Discretion is structural here, not a promise
We have six rooms. You won’t be in group therapy with forty strangers, and you won’t be recognisable in a car park. The Lodge is a house in the Kent countryside, not a facility with signage. Nothing leaves this building – not to your employer, not to your GP unless you ask us to involve them.
Coming back
The return to work is where recovery is usually won or lost, because the job is often where the pressure that fed the drinking lives. That’s what aftercare is for, and ours runs for twelve months after you leave, evenings and weekends, around a working week.
Before you go back, it’s worth having decided a few things: what you’ll say, what you’ll say no to, which client dinners you’ll skip for now, and who you’ll ring on the bad afternoon. We do that planning with you before you leave, not afterwards.
The part nobody says out loud
High-functioning people are often the last to get help, because the evidence that something is wrong is buried under evidence that everything is fine. The mortgage is paid. Nobody’s been sacked. It looks, from the outside, like it’s under control.
If you’re reading this on a work laptop at eleven at night, you already know the answer to that one.
Call 01795 431751. Free, confidential, and you don’t have to have decided anything to ring.