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Dr. Timothy Kelly, Community Health Network
Dr. Timothy Kelly, chief medical director for addiction treatment and integrated recovery at Community Health Network, has devoted his entire professional life to working in addiction medicine. While this high-stress field is infamous for the career-shortening burnout it triggers in many practitioners, Kelly has spent four decades doing everything from administering entire programs to treating literally thousands of individual patients. Yet he still maintains that his job is “a lot of fun.”
Perhaps that’s because his own family experience with addiction treatment had a positive outcome. As a child, he witnessed his alcoholic father get help via an Alcoholics Anonymous program, turn his life around and became an alcohol counselor working with veterans.
“I had the benefit of seeing this happen, and I thought it was pretty cool,” Kelly said. “Early on, I came to believe that people really can get better. That was probably a big factor in choosing this field.”
Besides treating patients himself, he’s also labored to teach everyone from business leaders to the general public to his own peers that addiction isn’t a shameful human weakness but an illness deserving compassionate treatment.
“Addiction used to be marginalized outside of mainstream medicine, so the main medical schools, centers and hospitals didn’t do a lot with it,” Kelly said. “Doctors didn’t even know it was an illness, and they would use derogatory terms about people suffering from it. But we’ve seen a lot of improvement over the years.”
Those improvements include new drugs for the treatment of opiate addiction, better training for young doctors, and a general increase in the level of attention that addiction receives. There’s also a growing understanding of the complexity of the problem and how addiction can be intertwined with and exacerbate existing mental conditions. For instance, research indicates that some 90% of women dealing with serious trauma also battle addiction.
Kelly plans to retire this May, but he’s still engaging in the sort of one-on-work that’s become his trademark—studying every pertinent detail of an individual addict’s life, from their home life to their support group. It’s the best way to treat their illness effectively and without judgment or stigma, he said.
“It’s so ridiculous to say that people with addiction are somehow inferior or worse than anybody else,” Kelly said. “At the end of the day, we’re all the same. We all have some kind of monkey on our back, and if we say we don’t, we’re either not telling the truth or we’re an alien.”•
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