Addiction treatment center Talbot Hall celebrates its 50th anniversary

The Ohio State Wexner Medical Center’s Talbot Hall — located at 1441 Phale D. Hale Drive — is celebrating its 50th anniversary during National Recovery Month.

Talbot Hall, founded in 1974, provides drug and alcohol addiction treatment services to people with substance use disorders. Talbot Hall director Mohamed Moinzadeh said employees and clinicians will acknowledge their 50th anniversary throughout September, which is National Recovery Month, with a faculty cookout, night of remembrance and other events.

“Most hospitals in the entire state, and the entire country, do not have an addiction treatment center like we do,” said Julie Teater, the hall’s medical director of addiction medicine. “Many have been shut down over the years, so that’s another part of why celebrating our 50th anniversary was such a big deal.”

Moinzadeh said the cookout took place Sept. 11 to celebrate employees of Talbot Hall and Ohio State Harding Hospital.

“I wanted to give something back to our employees for many years of being here and taking care of our patients,” Moinzadeh said.

In addition to illuminating Ohio State East Hospital’s tower purple — the official color of National Recovery Month — for September, Teater said Talbot Hall hosted a night of remembrance that was open to the community Aug. 27. At the event, speakers and peer supporters shared their experiences with losing loved ones and patients to unintentional overdoses.

“We’ve done the tower lighting for the last few years, but having the night of remembrance was kind of the new piece of it,” Teater said. “It was really successful and really well received.”

Moinzadeh said though the hall’s focus has always been treating drug and alcohol addiction by providing different levels of care, its approach to certain variables like patients’ durations of stay, medications and treatment philosophies have changed.

For instance, undergoing withdrawal management once equated to a 30-day stay, but Moinzadeh said that period has shortened over time.

“When you look at our withdrawal management days — and I’m not saying it’s bad or good, it’s just the way things are — we average three to five days,” Moinzadeh said. “And that’s a significant switch.”

Not only has Talbot Hall gained access to medications — such as buprenorphine, approved in 2002 — to treat opioid and alcohol use disorders, but it has also changed its philosophical approach to addiction treatment.

Teater said about 10 years ago, Talbot Hall made the switch from offering episodic management to having ongoing care, in which the patient is looked after and cared for by physicians, counselors and therapists in the long term.

“The philosophy and addiction treatment has changed, and the evidence shows that people do better treating substance use disorders as a chronic condition, just like we would treat heart disease or diabetes,” Teater said. “So having ongoing care, where you can step up and down the levels of care depending on how a patient’s doing, is kind of how the continuum has been built.”

During Talbot’s first days around 10-12 years ago, Moinzadeh said an abstinence-based program was in place. This approach focused on the number of times that patients would use drugs or alcohol, implementing restrictions or contracts if use continued during treatment.

Since then, Talbot Hall has decided to work with patients and build their trust rather than telling them they aren’t ready for treatment if they continue their substance use, Moinzadeh said.

“And really, it was a shift in paradigm of saying ‘You got to meet the patients where the patients are at and not look at someone using while they’re in treatment as a sense of their failures, but as a process in recovery,’” Moinzadeh said.

Though there are stigmas surrounding substance use, millions of people are sober and actively in recovery, living fruitful and healthy lives despite the negativity, Moinzadeh said. He said anyone who reaches out to Talbot Hall for treatment will be met with supportive care in a no-judgment environment with compassionate staff.

“For me, it is really important to recognize all the folks that are doing quite well for themselves,” Moinzadeh said. “That’s why you call it a Recovery Month, right? You can’t have a day. It’s got to be at least a month of celebrating people who take care of themselves.”