Alcohol rehab in Miami — clinical depth at your door.

For Miami families, the hour-plus drive to RECO's Delray Beach campus is part of the clinical value — it puts useful distance between the client and the Brickell or Coconut Grove social circles where the drinking was anchored. Addiction psychiatry is in-house, so naltrexone, acamprosate, and Vivitrol decisions happen alongside therapy planning rather than via outside referrals. The team specializes in alcohol use disorder, not one concern among many.

From Brickell or Coral Gables, the drive to RECO Intensive’s Delray Beach campus runs roughly an hour up I-95 — about 50 miles, give or take traffic through Fort Lauderdale. For most Miami clients seeking alcohol rehab, that distance is not an inconvenience to engineer around but a clinical asset to use. Daily commuting from Aventura or Coconut Grove is rarely realistic at the higher levels of care, and more importantly, putting geographic distance between a person and the specific bars, brunches, and social circles where their drinking became entrenched is part of how early sobriety actually takes hold. Most of our Miami admissions combine treatment with on-site sober-living through our structured housing network, which is one of the reasons the program works for people whose home environment in Pinecrest or Brickell is saturated with cues that would otherwise pull them back into the cycle within days.

Alcohol use disorder is the diagnosis we treat most often, and the program is built around that specificity. The continuum runs from medical detox when withdrawal severity requires it, into residential care or PHP-level stabilization, then down through intensive outpatient and a structured step-down into sober-living and alumni programming. Medication-assisted treatment is integrated where it is clinically indicated rather than handled as an afterthought. The clinical team specializes in alcohol use disorder; it is not one concern among many.

Why alcohol use disorder requires specialized medical attention

Alcohol is one of the very few substances where withdrawal itself can kill you. Opioid withdrawal is brutal but not generally fatal in an otherwise healthy adult; alcohol withdrawal, when severe, can produce seizures, autonomic instability, and delirium tremens — a syndrome with meaningful mortality if untreated. That clinical reality shapes how a responsible alcohol program is built. Before any therapy begins, every admission gets a medical assessment that screens for withdrawal risk using validated tools and reviews ASAM criteria across all six dimensions, including acute intoxication and withdrawal potential, biomedical conditions, and the recovery environment a person is returning to.

Even moderate alcohol use disorder warrants this evaluation. A person drinking a bottle of wine each evening for years may not look like a textbook detox candidate, but the autonomic and neurological adaptations are real, and so are the medical comorbidities — hypertension, liver enzyme elevation, sleep architecture disruption, nutritional deficiencies — that need to be acknowledged before group therapy will do much good. We do not push people through detox who do not need it, and we do not skip it for people who do.

Medication-assisted treatment for alcohol use disorder

Naltrexone and acamprosate are the two medications with the strongest evidence base for sustained recovery from alcohol use disorder, and we use both. Naltrexone — available as a daily oral dose or as the monthly Vivitrol injection — blunts the rewarding effects of alcohol and reduces craving in a substantial subset of patients. Acamprosate works on a different mechanism, helping stabilize the glutamate and GABA systems that chronic drinking disrupts, and it tends to be most useful for people who have already achieved abstinence and are trying to hold it. Disulfiram still has a role for highly motivated patients in structured environments. None of these medications are required, and none of them replace therapy.

What is unusual about how RECO handles MAT is that addiction psychiatry is in-house. The prescriber sits in the same clinical meetings as the primary therapist and the case manager, so a decision to start naltrexone or to taper a benzodiazepine used during detox is not a fax to an outside provider — it is a conversation in the room where the rest of the treatment plan is being built. Buprenorphine prescribing for co-occurring opioid use disorder, which is more common among Miami-area admissions than most families expect, is handled the same way. If opioids are part of the picture, the opioid-specific track coordinates with the alcohol work rather than running on a parallel track.

The behavioral therapy component

Medications reduce the pull of alcohol; therapy changes what a person does with their day, their relationships, and their internal weather. The behavioral backbone of the program is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Motivational Interviewing for the core craving-and-decision work, Dialectical Behavior Therapy skills for the emotion regulation deficits that drive a lot of relapse, and trauma-focused modalities — Trauma-Focused CBT and EMDR — when an underlying trauma history is feeding the drinking. These are delivered in both group and individual formats, with intensity calibrated to the level of care. At PHP that is roughly thirty hours per week of programming; at IOP it tapers to nine to twelve.

The point of the modality stack is not to expose every client to every approach. It is to match the clinical formulation. A Coral Gables professional whose drinking pattern is anchored in social anxiety and performance pressure needs a different treatment plan than an Aventura retiree whose grief and isolation have collapsed into a bottle every night. Both can recover. The map to get there is not the same.

Family therapy from week one

Alcohol use disorder is a family illness in the literal sense — the people who live with a drinker reorganize their lives around the drinking, often without realizing it, and that reorganization does not unwind on its own when the drinking stops. RECO integrates family therapy from intake. The primary therapist holds weekly family sessions, by video when family is in Miami and the client is in residential, in person once the client transitions to IOP and weekend visits are realistic. Separate programming exists for spouses, parents, and adult children, because the work each of those roles needs to do is different.

For Miami families specifically, the hour-plus drive ends up being workable on this rhythm. Most families come up on weekends during the residential phase, then attend family programming in person once the client moves into PHP or IOP and sober-living. Families who cannot travel that often participate by video, and we plan around it.

Local context, insurance, and how to start

RECO is in-network or works with major commercial carriers used by Miami-Dade employers — Aetna, Cigna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, United, and others. Insurance verification typically takes a few hours and gives a clear picture of what residential, PHP, and IOP coverage looks like under a specific plan before any financial commitment. For families who want a deeper read on the clinical model before calling, the alcohol-specific clinical overview walks through the levels of care in more detail.

Most Miami admissions are arranged within twenty-four to forty-eight hours of the first phone call. The intake conversation is with a clinician — not a salesperson — and covers drinking pattern, prior treatment, medical history, and what is actually going on at home in Brickell, Pinecrest, or wherever the person is calling from. From there we discuss whether detox is needed, what level of care is appropriate, and how transportation from Miami will work. (866) 396-2008 reaches admissions directly.

Serving residents of: Brickell, Coral Gables, Coconut Grove, Aventura, Pinecrest.