Editorial Policy

Official Sources Only

Facts about treatment, medications, coverage and the law come only from government agencies and the official text of the law:

• the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), including FindTreatment.gov, the source of every facility listing;
• the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and the wider National Institutes of Health (NIH);
• the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), including FDA drug labels;
• the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Medicaid.gov and Medicare.gov for what coverage pays for;
• the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for veterans' treatment programs;
• state agencies for substance use services, Medicaid coverage, licensing and recovery residence certification.

Treatment center marketing, other rehab directories, forums and personal stories are never used as sources. Every figure shows its year and where it came from. The How Listings Work page explains how the facility data is collected and refreshed.

Information, Not Medical Advice

Pages explain how treatment works, what the options are and how to pay for care. They don't diagnose anyone, recommend a specific facility or tell you which level of care or medication is right for you. They never promise recovery, success rates or outcomes. Those decisions belong with a doctor, nurse or licensed counselor who can assess you.

Where a decision depends on your own situation, pages point you to free help: SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988, and 911 in an emergency.

Respectful, Plain Language

• Pages talk to you directly, in short sentences, for someone reading on a phone.
• Language is person-first and free of stigma, following the guidance of NIDA and SAMHSA: "a person with a substance use disorder," "in recovery," "a positive or negative test." Pages never use slang or labels that define a person by their substance use.
• Medical and program terms, such as "medication for opioid use disorder" or "intensive outpatient," are explained the first time they appear.
• Pages state a fact and its limit once, without scare language or piled-up hedges.

What Every Page Goes Through Before Publishing

• It answers its main question near the top, with the source and date.
• Each fact is recorded with the official page it came from, and automated checks confirm that figures trace to those records.
• Automated checks confirm that internal links work and that the wording meets these standards.
• It is reviewed for accuracy and clarity by Michael Rupe, a U.S. Air Force veteran. He is not a clinician, and his review covers accuracy against the sources and plain wording, not medical judgment.

Facility Listings Are Never Sold

Every substance use facility in SAMHSA's FindTreatment.gov data is listed, with only the details its own record states. No facility can pay to be listed, ranked, featured or described differently, and Rehab Help adds no ratings, reviews or quality claims of its own. Listing phone numbers are the facilities' own numbers from SAMHSA, never tracked or call-center lines.

How Corrections Work

A guide is corrected when an official source shows it is wrong or out of date. The correction fixes the detail, cites the supporting source and updates the page's review date. To report an error, use the contact form with the page address and, if you can, the official page that shows the right detail. Changes to a facility's own record go through SAMHSA, as the How Listings Work page explains.

Independence From Advertisers

The site is paid for by display ads from Google AdSense. Google chooses the ads; advertisers never see pages before they go live and have no say in what they say. Ads never appear inside or between facility listings, and they never decide which facilities are shown or in what order. The advertising disclosure covers where ads appear.

How Paid Offers Would Be Labelled

An affiliate offer may be added later, such as an online care service. If it is, it will sit in its own box labelled "Sponsored," with a disclosure line, and never inside facility listings, a guide's answer or a list of official resources. Its links will be marked as sponsored for search engines. It will never be a paid referral to a treatment facility or recovery home: the federal Eliminating Kickbacks in Recovery Act (18 U.S.C. 220) and state patient-brokering laws prohibit those payments.

Who Is Responsible

Rehab Help is published by Rupe Enterprises LLC, a Washington company. Neither the publisher nor the reviewer provides treatment, medical advice or placement in a program. To find care, use the treatment finder or call SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357.