Alcohol rehab in West Palm Beach — clinical depth at your door.

RECO Intensive is the closest specialist-level alcohol rehab to West Palm Beach — 18 miles and about 28 minutes from El Cid, Flamingo Park, and SoSo down I-95. Addiction psychiatry, medication-assisted treatment with naltrexone and acamprosate, and family therapy are all delivered in-house on the same continuum, so a West Palm family is not coordinating four providers across four addresses. The drive time makes weekly in-person family sessions realistic in a way out-of-state treatment cannot match.

West Palm Beach sits 18 miles north of RECO Intensive’s Delray Beach campus — a 28-minute drive down I-95 or Federal Highway outside of rush hour. For Palm Beach County residents living south of Okeechobee Boulevard, from El Cid and Flamingo Park down through SoSo, the Delray campus is the nearest specialist-level PHP and IOP program with an integrated sober-living network on the same continuum. Families in Northwood Hills and downtown West Palm Beach often find that proximity matters most during the first 60 days, when family therapy sessions, medication adjustments, and medical follow-ups stack up week after week.

Alcohol use disorder is the most common substance use disorder we treat at RECO, and it is the one most often dismissed or under-treated. Many people in West Palm Beach who eventually reach our intake line have already tried abstinence on their own, attended outpatient counseling that did not address the physical withdrawal, or relied on AA without the medical or psychiatric component their body and brain actually needed. The program described below is built to address all three.

Why alcohol use disorder requires specialized medical attention

Alcohol is one of only a handful of substances whose withdrawal syndrome can kill a person. Opioid withdrawal is miserable; alcohol withdrawal, in its severe forms, produces seizures, autonomic instability, and delirium tremens — a condition with a meaningful mortality rate even in the modern era when untreated. The risk is not limited to people drinking a fifth a day. Long-standing daily use of even six to eight drinks, especially in someone over 50 or with co-occurring benzodiazepine use, can produce a withdrawal severe enough to require inpatient medical management.

For that reason, every alcohol admission at RECO begins with a full medical and psychiatric assessment using the ASAM Criteria — the six-dimensional framework that addiction medicine uses to match patients to the correct level of care. Dimension 1 (acute intoxication and withdrawal potential), Dimension 2 (biomedical conditions), and Dimension 3 (emotional, behavioral, or cognitive conditions) are usually the deciding factors for whether someone needs residential care first, can step directly into our partial hospitalization program, or is appropriate for intensive outpatient from day one. We do not guess at this — we measure it.

Medication-assisted treatment for alcohol use disorder

Behavioral therapy alone has a known relapse rate in alcohol use disorder, and the evidence for medication-assisted treatment has been strong for over two decades. RECO routinely uses naltrexone — either daily oral or monthly intramuscular Vivitrol — to blunt the reinforcing effect of alcohol and reduce craving intensity. Acamprosate is added or used as an alternative for clients who have already stopped drinking and need help stabilizing the glutamate–GABA imbalance that drives early-recovery dysphoria and sleep disturbance. Disulfiram still has a place for a subset of motivated patients, usually with family or sponsor support for daily dosing.

What distinguishes the medication piece at RECO is that addiction psychiatry is in-house. A West Palm Beach client does not get a counselor at one address and a prescriber at another with a four-week wait. Medication decisions are made in the same building, in coordination with the therapist, and adjusted as the clinical picture changes. For clients with co-occurring opioid use, buprenorphine management is handled by the same team. Insurance verification — including the major Palm Beach County plans — runs through our benefits department before admission so families understand the financial picture up front.

The behavioral therapy component

The therapy backbone of RECO’s alcohol program is built from modalities with the strongest evidence base for substance use disorders: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for identifying and restructuring the thoughts and situations that drive drinking, Dialectical Behavior Therapy skills for the affective dysregulation that often underlies long-standing alcohol use, and Motivational Interviewing as the relational stance our clinicians use across every encounter. Trauma-Focused CBT and EMDR are available for the substantial subset of clients whose drinking is downstream of unresolved trauma.

Therapy is delivered in both group and individual formats. In PHP, clients typically have a daily process group, two to three skills groups per day, a weekly individual session with their primary therapist, and a weekly psychiatry check-in. In IOP, the format steps down to three to five sessions per week while clients return to work, school, or family responsibilities. A focused look at what specific therapies look like inside the alcohol program is available on our alcohol addiction treatment page.

Family therapy from week one

Alcohol use disorder is a family illness in the most literal sense — by the time someone enters treatment, the people around them have adapted in ways that are exhausting, demoralizing, and often unhelpful even when well-intentioned. RECO does not wait until “the client is ready” to involve the family. Family therapy begins in the first week of admission, with weekly sessions led by the client’s primary therapist that include partners, parents, or adult children as appropriate.

In addition to the conjoint sessions, separate family programming runs for spouses, parents, and adult children of clients. These are educational and process-oriented — covering what enabling looks like, what reasonable boundaries sound like, what relapse signs to watch for, and how to support recovery without becoming the recovery. For families in West Palm Beach, the 28-minute drive makes weekly in-person family work realistic in a way that out-of-state treatment never is. After discharge, clients transition into our sober-living network or directly to aftercare and alumni programming, both of which keep the family component active.

How to start, insurance, and what West Palm Beach families can expect

The intake process begins with a phone call to (866) 396-2008. A clinician — not a salesperson — collects a clinical history, asks about current drinking patterns, withdrawal history, prior treatment, co-occurring conditions, and medications. We verify insurance benefits in parallel: most major commercial plans used in Palm Beach County are in-network or have out-of-network coverage that makes treatment accessible, and our benefits team explains the specific numbers before you commit to anything.

If a West Palm Beach resident is medically appropriate for direct PHP or IOP admission, transportation from West Palm to the Delray campus can be arranged for clients in early treatment. For those who need medical detox first, we coordinate with detox partners and resume the clinical continuum on the back end. The point of describing the program in this much detail is to make one thing clear: this is a clinical treatment program, not a marketing operation. The page you’re reading exists because too many alcohol-focused landing pages do not give families enough real information to make a decision.

Serving residents of: El Cid, Flamingo Park, Northwood Hills, SoSo, Downtown WPB.