What common problems do people face after rehabilitation? - Donald Peck Leslie, MD

One of my great concerns about the brevity and the shrinking of the time that is spent in actual rehabilitation, is that the person may or may not be fully prepared to leave the sheltered center where we teach them. It is very easy here, all the doors are wide, we have electric door openers, and ramps and everything, accessibility is perfect. The world is not perfect, I mean the Americans with Disability Act is 25-years old but everybody doesn’t adhere to it unfortunately. There is life beyond rehabilitation, and there is life beyond therapy but your therapy never really stops. I think that if you really look at where you’re going, your home, your community, hopefully back to work, many people go back to work. We have a very high back to work percentage. But one of the things I fear is that while patients are here, they are being seen in a psychology program typically, group therapy and individual therapy and some medications possibly that the big D, the depression is going to hit. It’s bound to, to some degree, I mean we’re all human. And once we get back into the reality of our lives, it may not be quite as much as fun as we hoped it might be. The reality does set in, not necessarily on day one out of the hospital, but there’s hope there, but there’s also help available at home. If not at home, we tell everyone please contact us, let us know, let us help find someone for you in your own community that can help you with whatever stumbling block you’re finding. But that is an ongoing problem because of the lessening of the time that is allowed. We have a program here called Beyond Therapy, and many people come back to that and they come back to see what else they can do.