Tom Farley likens someone struggling with addiction to someone drowning at the deep end of the pool. Treatment, which often looks like a 30-day program, gets them over to the side edge or the shallow end and prevents them from drowning.
“But they’re still in the pool,” Farley says. “They still haven’t learned how to swim, and that’s recovery.”
There’s a difference between treatment and recovery, and that’s one of Farley’s main messages he shares in his new role as community outreach director for the Madison-based Recovery.com (which rebranded at the end of 2023 from RehabPath, a mental health and addiction resource website founded by Ben Camp and Jeremiah Calvino).
Farley, a Madison native who founded the Chris Farley Foundation and authored “The Chris Farley Show” biography, has been an advocate for addiction recovery for 27 years — ever since his younger brother, Chris Farley, died at age 33 from a drug overdose. “But I was circling at 30,000 feet,” he says.
He had worked in banking and marketing mostly and got “the corporate work experience” in New York and Madison while also working as a motivational speaker on a national scale. Then he decided to change career paths to more directly work in treatment, recovery and prevention. He took a job in 2021 at Rosecrance, a behavioral health services provider with addiction treatment programs, based in Rockford, Illinois (which has one Madison clinic, Connections Counseling).