Eighteen years on Ventura Boulevard delivering addiction treatment built for the people the rest of the field consistently misses: combat veterans, the badge, the bunker, and the rigs. Plus a full continuum of care for adults across the Valley.
NDMH Rehab opened on Ventura Boulevard in 2008 to address a gap that was visible to anyone who spent time in the San Fernando Valley's hospitals, courts, and police stations: there was no addiction treatment facility in the area equipped to handle the specific clinical needs of veterans, law enforcement, fire-service personnel, and EMS workers. These populations were arriving at general programs with combat exposure, scene trauma, and occupational PTSD that the standard curriculum had no framework for, and they were leaving — often early, often skeptical, often with the addiction unchanged.
The founding clinical team — Dr. Yelena Marchetti, an addiction-medicine physician who had served as a Navy lieutenant before medical school, and Dr. Curtis Halloran, a clinical psychologist with subspecialty training in combat trauma at VA Greater Los Angeles — built the original program around a single conviction: occupational trauma is its own clinical category, and the addiction work has to be built on top of trauma-informed clinical scaffolding, not next to it. The first cohort in 2008 was twelve patients. Five were post-9/11 veterans, three were LAPD officers, two were LAFD personnel, and two were Valley-area first responders from adjacent municipalities.
Eighteen years later, NDMH has treated more than 9,900 patients across the residential, PHP, IOP, and outpatient continuum. The veterans and first-responder track is still the program's clinical anchor, and the dedicated peer-cohort structure for first-responder patients during the first two weeks of residential is the piece our alumni most often identify as what made the difference. The 137-person clinical team includes addiction-medicine physicians, board-certified psychiatrists with addiction-psychiatry subspecialty training, licensed clinical psychologists, marriage and family therapists, registered nurses, case managers, and a peer-support team that includes alumni now working at NDMH as licensed counselors.
NDMH exists to deliver clinically excellent addiction treatment — built around evidence, measured against outcomes, and refined continuously — for the patient populations that general programming has historically underserved.
Clinical excellence has a specific operational meaning at NDMH. It means staffing ratios that allow the clinical team to know each patient as a person rather than a case file. It means outcomes measurement at admission, mid-stay, discharge, and 90-day and 12-month follow-up, with the data shared openly with referring physicians and prospective patients. It means clinical leadership that reads the addiction-medicine literature in active rotation and adjusts protocols when the evidence shifts. The 12-month sustained-sobriety rate on our veterans and first-responder cohort is the number we report first.
Three pillars structure the clinical work at NDMH.
Every clinician, nurse, and support-staff member completes formal trauma-informed-care training before patient contact and annual refresher training. The orientation is operational — it shapes how rooms are arranged, how groups are facilitated, and how staff respond when a patient is dysregulated at 2 a.m. For a population that has spent years in environments where showing vulnerability had real costs, this matters more than it sounds.
Our clinical model starts from what the patient brings — discipline, mission focus, capacity under pressure, peer-support instincts shaped by years of service — and uses those strengths as the scaffolding for recovery. The deficit-focused framing common in some segments of addiction treatment does not produce engagement in our population.
Abstinence remains a clinical goal for many patients. For some — particularly those with long opioid histories or high overdose risk — the evidence supports a harm-reduction-aware approach: medication-assisted treatment, overdose prevention training, and a clinical relationship that does not collapse if a patient slips. We meet patients where the data says outcomes are best.
Co-Founder and Medical Director
Board-certified in internal medicine and addiction medicine. Commissioned officer, U.S. Navy, 2001 to 2005, with operational service supporting two combat deployments. Trained at UCLA School of Medicine, addiction-medicine fellowship at Cedars-Sinai. Co-founded NDMH in 2008. Sets withdrawal protocols, oversees the medical detox wing, and runs the weekly addiction-medicine case conference.
Co-Founder and Clinical Director
Licensed clinical psychologist board-certified in clinical psychology, with subspecialty training in combat-related PTSD at VA Greater Los Angeles. Doctorate from UCLA. Co-founded NDMH in 2008. Directs the residential and outpatient therapy curricula and runs the trauma-informed-care training cycle for all 137 staff.
Director of Psychiatry
Board-certified psychiatrist with subspecialty certification in addiction psychiatry. Joined NDMH in 2019 to lead the dual-diagnosis program after twelve years on the clinical faculty at UCLA Semel Institute. Reviews every dual-diagnosis admission within 48 hours and supervises the four-psychiatrist staff team.
Director of the First-Responder Track
Licensed marriage and family therapist and Registered Addiction Specialist. Fourteen years of clinical work with law enforcement, fire-service, and EMS populations across LAPD, LAFD, and Los Angeles County agencies. Designed NDMH's two-week first-responder peer-cohort intake structure and supervises the dedicated clinical team that runs it.
"I am twenty-six. Three years on the LAPD, working West Bureau patrol out of West Los Angeles Division. The drinking started in the academy and got worse with each year on the job. By the third year I was drinking before night-watch shifts, which is when I told myself I had a problem I could not handle alone. The intake at NDMH was the first time I had said any of it out loud to someone who was not also on the job. They put me in a peer cohort with three other officers and an LAFD paramedic for the first two weeks. Eighteen months sober now. Still on the force."
- Officer N.M., residential alumnus, 2024
"Thirteen years at an entertainment law firm in Century City, partner track since year five. The cocaine started at industry events and the alcohol started everywhere else, and by the end I was managing a billable practice on three hours of sleep a night. My executive coach was the person who finally said something I could not deflect. The NDMH intake walked me through how the leave conversation with my firm would work before I even committed to coming in. I completed sixty days residential, then their evening IOP. I kept the partnership track."
- Alexis B., residential alumna, 2023
"Twenty-two years on the LAFD, ten of those running engine companies out of busy stations across the Valley. The job had given me things to remember that I could not stop remembering, and the off-duty drinking that started as a release became something else by year fifteen. NDMH was different from the assessment forward — they had a first-responder track with two other firefighters in my cohort, and the clinical team had treated occupational PTSD before. I am four years sober now and run a peer-support meeting at the union hall on Tuesday nights."
- Captain D.R., residential alumnus, 2022
Our compassionate team is ready to help you take the first step.
