Review Terms & Guidelines

We love hearing about your treatment experience and value you sharing it! We also want our site to be a safe and trustworthy source. To help us with this goal, and to get your review published as quickly as possible, please be sure to follow these guidelines:

Reviews must be based on your first-hand experience

We want to hear about your experience. This means no second-hand information, hearsay, rumors, or quotations from other sources in your review. Please, only provide reviews based on substantial experiences you’ve had with the treatment provider. Be sure to include enough detail in your review that other individuals and families will find it helpful.

Reviews must be real and relevant

We want reviews by real people with real experiences with the treatment provider. Only former clients, loved ones of former clients, and referring professionals may leave a review for a treatment provider with whom they have interacted. (See more about eligibility)

To be relevant, keep in mind that individuals and families are reading reviews to understand what the treatment experience may be like at a particular center. So, share details about your experience and avoid issues regarding politics, wider social issues, treatment debates, etc.

Reviews must be respectful

Reviews give people the opportunity to share their voice with a broader audience. We want to maintain a respectful environment because we want your voice to be heard. This means refraining from disrespectful content, including the following:

• Advertisements
• Defamation, libel
• Detailed drinking and using episodes*
• Hate speech
• Invasion of others’ privacy
  • (that is, do not post other people’s personal information, such as phone number, email address, mailing address, etc.)
• Lies, exaggeration, impersonating others
• Name-calling, personal insults
• Phishing or malware sites
• Prejudiced language
  • (against people on the basis of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation religion, age, disability, etc.)
• Profanity
• Sexually explicit content*
• Threats
• Vulgarity

Eligibility to Write a Review

We want reviews to be trustworthy and helpful, so we limit eligibility to former clients, loved ones of former clients, and referring professionals who have first-hand experience with the treatment provider they are reviewing.

• A former client of the treatment provider—We want the full picture of a client’s experience, so a reviewer must not be actively enrolled in a program (with the exception of aftercare). Program completion is not required; in fact, we encourage you to include if you left early and why.


• A loved one of a former client of the treatment provider—We know a loved one will have a different experience than a client, but we still value their opinion. We want to hear how the provider treated them throughout the treatment process. A loved one can be anyone with a relationship to a former client (partner, father, mother, sister, brother, son, daughter, friend, etc.) who has had an experience with the treatment provider. So relationship + experience.


• A referring professional—We want to capture this angle of a treatment provider too. It is helpful not only for other professionals to see what working with a particular provider is like, but also for individuals and families to see if professionals trust a provider. A referring professional is a person whose job includes referring clients to treatment providers (e.g. doctor, psychiatrist, personal therapist, interventionist, nurse, lawyer). Again, the referring professional has to have an experience (or multiple) with the treatment provider they are reviewing. Employees or former employees of treatment providers may not leave reviews of their employer.

DOs and DON’Ts for Writing a Review

DO

☑ Honestly report your experience

☑ Be relevant and respectful

☑ Be concise and to-the-point

DON’T

🆇 Report someone else’s experience

🆇 Include personally identifiable information (phone number, email address)

🆇 Use HTML tags, excessive ALL CAPS or slang

Examples

☑ Relevant: It was important to me to detox without Suboxone, so I found this center’s approach really beneficial to my recovery because they accommodated my wish and provided a supportive, comfortable detox.

🆇 Irrelevant, disrespectful, all caps: People who are on SUBOXONE ARE JUNKIES. “REHABS” who prescribe it ARE DISHONEST.

Flagging a Review and Reporting Abuse

To report possible violations of the guidelines, please email [email protected]—specify the location of the content and the reason you believe it violates our guidelines.

How Reviews Are Collected

Reviews are collected in two main ways:

• eligible audiences are able to leave a review via a provider's listing;
• treatment providers are able to share the listing or review link with their former clients, loved ones of former clients, and referring professionals inviting them to participate in our review survey.

No compensation of any kind can be given in exchange for a positive review (i.e. payment, discounts, reimbursements).

If you receive an offer for compensation in exchange for a positive review, please forward the offer to [email protected]

One must NOT submit feedback on someone else’s behalf. For example, treatment providers cannot “help” fill out the survey for an eligible reviewer, nor can they submit feedback they have received from previous surveys, comment cards, etc.

How Reviews Are Published

We will publish reviews as soon as possible, typically within several business days.

We will read reviews before publishing them.

Reviews will not be published upon clicking submit; we will read them before publishing. If a review does not match the guidelines, we will not publish them.

Under what circumstances will you take reviews down?

When a review is breaking guidelines or terms, then we will take it down. (Hopefully, we would not have put it up in the first place, but we are human after all.)

Recovery.com reserves the right to remove a review or provider response at any time for any reason. We reserve the right to make minor edits within the spirit of the original review. The reviews posted on Recovery.com are individual and highly subjective opinions. The opinions expressed in reviews are of former clients, loved ones of former clients, and referring professionals—and not of Recovery.com. We do not endorse any of the opinions expressed by reviewers or in provider responses. We are not affiliated with any establishment listed or reviewed on this web site. In accordance with ourprivacy policy, Recovery.com does not release anyone's personal contact information.

Updated 8 June 2023