I grew up in West Philadelphia. I’m the reason Will Smith left.
When my mother married my father, we moved to the suburbs — a different world from the one I’d known. I have two younger sisters, Emily and Olivia. I went to Saint Joseph’s Prep, an all-boys Jesuit high school in North Philadelphia. Then Penn State for a year, Kutztown, and eventually Temple University.
That’s the tidy version of my early life. The rest is more complicated.
In the mid-2000s, I got my first real look at the treatment industry from the inside — as a patient. I went to Delray Beach, Florida, looking for a way out. What I found instead was a front-row seat to the worst the industry had to offer: body brokering, people dying in the rooms. People on Suboxone, gabapentin, medically assisted treatment of any kind were being ostracized — pushed out of the rooms, made to feel like they weren’t really in recovery. The judgment was relentless. And some of those people didn’t make it. That shaped me more than anything else I saw down there.
I also found five years of recovery in Delray. Both things were true at the same time.
That experience is where my philosophy of recovery was born. As long as you’re not creating chaos, as long as you’re not hurting yourself or someone else, and you’re genuinely trying to build a better life — who am I to judge how you’re doing it? Recovery isn’t one size fits all. It never was.
Then I left. I like to call what came next research and development. I moved to Las Vegas and took full advantage of everything Sin City had to offer — drugs, alcohol, gambling, you name it. I wasn’t hiding from it. I was in it.
Eventually life pulled me back east. I was living in West Palm Beach when I was involved in a hit and run accident. I suffered two traumatic brain injuries in under forty-eight hours — once in the accident, and once again on a walk with my dog before I even knew how badly I was hurt. That brought me to Los Angeles.
Los Angeles is where the second chapter of my recovery life began.
About a year and a half after the TBI, I became the Housing Director at Hillside and Tarzana Recovery Centers, then Director of Admissions, and eventually the quasi-BD rep — a role I sort of grew into before anyone gave it an official name. It was in that work that I met Armen Melikyan, Gaspar Melikyan, and Peter Blikian, the owners of Quest 2 Recovery. One conversation led to another, and here I am — now working in business development for Quest 2 Recovery, a detox and residential treatment center in Quartz Hill, California.
I’ve held just about every role that exists between someone walking in the front door of a treatment center and someone walking out the other side.
People in recovery sometimes weaponize their time — how many years they have, as if the number makes them more qualified to be heard. I don’t do that. We all have today. That’s the only time that’s ever been real.
I’m writing this blog because when my traumatic brain injury happened, my family and I had no idea where to turn. We were scared, uninformed, and completely unsure of how to navigate a system that can be as predatory as it is life-saving. Nobody should have to figure that out alone.
I’m writing this for the person who isn’t sure treatment will work for them. I’m writing this for the person who is afraid to take their first step into their first treatment center. I’m writing this for the families who are watching someone they love disappear and don’t know what to do next.
I’ve been the patient, the housing director, the admissions rep, and the person sitting across the desk trying to find someone a bed. I’ve seen this industry from every angle. This blog is what I wish had existed when I needed it.
— Ryan Young
Free From Treatment 