Better Safe Than Sorry –
Sept. 22, 2019 –
Rock, meet hard place.
The 20-year-old’s family was showing tough love, a skill they had learned from the interventionist who had flown in from Pennsylvania a day earlier to help get Jenny off meth. (The family would only participate in this article if they were kept anonymous, so The Times is using a pseudonym for her.) She calmed down, as much as she could, and came back inside the house. Her relatives read letters, expressing how much they cared about her but pledging to enable her no more.
She agreed to go to treatment. She had 20 minutes to pack her bags. A few hours later, she was on a plane for the West Coast. It sounds like a scene out of the TV show “Intervention.” As it so happens, a star of the A&E program was the one conducting the intervention that late July day.
Jim Riedy, who appeared on the most recent season of the long-running series, has done more than 350 interventions over the past seven years. He recently started bringing his skills to Northwest Indiana after hiring an intervention coordinator based in the Region. Riedy performed another intervention in Kouts, just a couple weeks later, for Jenny’s best friend.
