Paul Getzendanner JD, LCSW, CADC

Chief Executive Officer

Paul is an attorney, social worker and person in long-term recovery. Paul received his law degree from Loyola University Chicago in 1994 and, 16 years later, returned to Loyola’s School of Social Work to earn his MSW degree. Following a successful litigation career, Paul began a second career as a counselor for Hazelden Betty Ford in Chicago. From there, Paul held clinical, supervisory and executive positions with Gateway Foundation, the nation’s largest nonprofit SUD treatment provider, ultimately managing Gateway’s Chicago residential, outpatient and recovery-home services. More recently, Paul held executive positions, Regional Executive Director and Senior Vice President, Strategic Initiatives, with multi-state medication-assisted treatment provider Symetria Recovery, helping grow that company from 1 to 12 locations.



Paul is a member of Illinois’ Opioid Crisis Response Advisory Council and has been an expert witness before the Legislature’s Heroin Crisis Task Force. Paul formerly served on the Illinois Association for Behavioral Health’s Board of Directors and currently sits on the Board of Directors for the Counseling Center of the Northshore.

The lesson learned from this professional experience, along with past personal experience as a consumer of treatment services, is that treatment as usual (“TAU”), despite the best intentions and a heroic frontline workforce, does not work for most participants, often perpetuating a cycle of treatment-relapse-more treatment. TAU is too brief, too one-size-fits-all, relying almost exclusively on group therapy and 12-step underpinnings, and, perhaps most significantly, it is delivered in a completely artificial setting that makes returning home and sustaining progress so difficult. 

Paul was drawn to Front Door Health (“FDH”) as an alternative, or complement, to TAU, offering the right kind of treatment, evidence-based and (truly) individualized medical and behavioral services, administered for a sufficient length of time to take hold, and delivered in the appropriate context – the client’s real-world, home environment.