Complaint Review: The Watershed Addiction Treatment Center

The Watershed Addiction Treatment Center uses fraudulent approaches to recruit admissions to their rehab center. They have dozens of links all over the internet that lead directly back to their website. They prey on vulnerable families in times of crisis, stating that they are the best facility to help you with your problems.

They will lie to you about everything from the moment you make contact with them. They claim that they are a luxury rehab center, they offer various different amenities, top notch therapies, and they claim that their program is 30 days in length. They claim to work with "every insurance provider to manage the costs of treatment" and they also offer to pay for your airfare, if you are traveling to the Watershed from out of state.

Be weary of making contact with the Watershed for purposes of gathering basic information, as they will continue to call you on an hourly basis after your initial phone call. They try to persuade you to attend their facility - no doubt the intake coordinators make some type of compensation for the number of patients they bring in.

They also use fraudulent internet advertising practices, stating that they have facilities located in your area. As an example, I searched Google for "The Watershed Addiction Treatment Center" and was given 3 local options:

One located at 68 Dorrance St. Providence, RI, one located at 270 Bellevue Avenue, #341, Newport, RI, and one located at 16 Sconticut Neck Rd, #208, Fairhaven MA. Upon further investigation (read: a Google search of these addresses), each and every address was not the Watershed, but was in fact a UPS store. I did some further snooping, using various different states, and found that ALL addresses that the Watershed advertises to be local are, in fact, the addresses of current or former UPS stores. I don't know why this is, but it is indeed false and shady advertisement.

Having attended the Watershed in the past, I can attest to the poor quality of treatment. They have two different inpatient locations in Florida - one in Boca Raton and one in Boynton Beach. They have three floors of patients at the Boynton Beach facility, two for men, one for women. There are about 60 patients on each floor. Everything that I was told on the phone was a lie. There is no one-on-one counseling - most of the therapy took place in large groups. They are not located on the beach, they do not have therapeutic outings, and, perhaps most importantly, the program is not 30 days in length. They attempt to force you to stay there, using scare tactics on your family, telling them that you will relapse and die if you come home. They try to turn family against paitent, which is NOT what one needs in a time like this. Overall, their program does more harm than good.

Also, they run an aftercare program, known as PHP or The Apartments. They are run down, drug ridden, and in an unsafe neighborhood. I would not recommend this program under any circumstances. The false advertising alone should have sent me running, but alas, I only found it after my stay in hell.