Your rights while you live here
Given to every resident at intake, posted on the wall of the house, and here so you can read it before you decide.
Template pending legal review. Aftermath is housing rather than a licensed treatment facility, so no state-prescribed patient rights statement applies to it. That does not make this optional: these are the commitments the home makes to the people living in it. Have counsel review them, and post them in the home as well as here.
You have the right to
- Be treated with dignity. Not shouted at, not humiliated, not made an example of in front of the house.
- Be free from abuse. Physical, verbal, sexual, psychological or financial, from staff or from another resident.
- Be free from restraint or seclusion used for discipline or convenience.
- Privacy in your person, your possessions and your records, within what a shared home and a safety policy allow. We tell you in advance what is searched and when.
- Confidentiality. We do not confirm to anybody that you live here without your written permission naming them. See the privacy notice.
- See your own records and ask for corrections.
- Know what everything costs, in writing, before you agree to it, including room and board, any fee, and what happens to money you have paid if you leave early.
- Keep your own recovery program, your own providers and your own supports. We work around them. We do not replace them and we do not overrule them.
- Make your own medical decisions. We do not provide treatment, prescribe, or tell you what care to accept. Where a court has ordered a placement, we will tell you plainly what leaving would mean with them.
- Keep taking prescribed medication, including medication for opioid use disorder, without being pressured to stop or questioned about it.
- Practice a religion, or none. No belief is required of you here.
- Receive visitors and communicate privately, at the times the house sets, and to contact a lawyer, a court, an advocate or a regulator at any time without needing permission.
- Have your possessions and reasonable space to keep them.
- Free language assistance and reasonable disability accommodation. See the nondiscrimination notice.
- Leave. This is voluntary and the door is not locked.
- Complain, to us or over our heads to a regulator, without anybody retaliating and without it affecting your place here. See the complaints page.
- A safe exit. If your placement ends, for any reason, you are not put on the street. We arrange somewhere and we get you there.
What we ask of you in return
The household expectations are short and they are set out in full on the home page. The short version is: stay clean and sober, be where you said you would be, do your chores, respect everybody else's privacy, and no violence and no weapons.
If a right is not being honored
Tell any staff member, or use the written grievance process, or go straight to the state. All three routes are on the complaints page. Nobody here is permitted to make life harder for you because you used one of them, and doing so is itself a serious matter.