Safety
When to stop reading and get help.
This site is for working out the weeks after treatment. If tonight has already become an emergency, reading is the wrong tool and this page is the more useful one. Take only what you need from it.
Contact emergency services now if
Somebody cannot be woken, has had a seizure or a fit, is having trouble breathing, has chest pain, is vomiting blood, has collapsed, or has taken alcohol together with other drugs or medication. Also if you are in immediate danger, cannot keep yourself safe, are having thoughts of ending your life, somebody in your home has made you afraid, or you are worried about a child's safety.
Use the emergency number for the country you are actually in. This site publishes no telephone numbers: they differ everywhere, they change, and a wrong number costs time that a bad night does not have.
The AI guide on this site cannot help with any of that. It cannot contact anybody, cannot monitor you, and will not try to hold a conversation that needs a human being in the room.
If you have started drinking again and it is daily
The physical question comes before everything else, including how you feel about it. Do not stop suddenly on your own, and do not let anybody talk you into it. Withdrawal from physical alcohol dependence is one of the few withdrawals that can kill, and the danger window is the first seventy-two hours. Shaking in the morning, sweating, retching, a racing heart, seeing or hearing things that are not there, and severe confusion are the signs that this has become medical.
That is a doctor, today, or urgent medical care — not a plan for tomorrow. Medically managed withdrawal is routine, widely available, and in many countries free. Nobody there will be surprised by you, and coming out of treatment and going back is not a moral event to them.
This site will never suggest a taper, a dose, a medication or a timetable, because that is a clinician's decision made with sight of you. James was medically detoxed before the residential month in 2020; that part was not optional then and it is not optional now.
If the clinic gave you an out-of-hours number
Most discharge packs contain one, and most people never ring it. This is what it was for. A key worker, a duty line or an alumni contact will take the call at an hour when nothing else is open, and nobody at the other end thinks less of somebody for using it in the first ninety days. If your pack does not have one, ask for it — in writing — and ask what happens on a Saturday.
If you are having thoughts of suicide
This is more common in the weeks after treatment than the discharge meeting tends to say, and more common among men who drink than the figures let on. It does not mean the situation is what it feels like at that hour.
If you are in immediate danger, your local emergency number is the fastest route. Otherwise a crisis line, your doctor, or one person you trust — in that order of speed. Free crisis lines exist in nearly every country; search for the one in yours, or ask your doctor. This site does not name numbers, on the ground that a wrong or outdated one is worse than none at all.
If it is the household that is not safe
If you are frightened of somebody in the house, or a child is not safe there, that is not a conversation for a chat window. Your local emergency number, or a domestic abuse service where you live, comes first. That holds whichever way round it is — the person coming home from treatment is not always the one who is frightened.
What the AI guide will do
If anything on this page appears in what you write, the guide stops the ordinary conversation, says so plainly, and points you here. It will not diagnose you, rate how well the ninety days are going, ask you to score anything, or carry on as though the conversation were about planning.
Those replies are never shortened, never counted against a daily allowance, and never withheld. Nothing commercial is ever shown to somebody in trouble.
This page is general information, not medical advice, and not a crisis service. Nothing on this site is monitored by a person.