All Posts

4th February 2025

Life in Australia: David Best

When he moved to Melbourne in Australia, David was very fortunate to meet Professor Dan Lubman, a wonderful and inspirational figure who is not a part of the traditional clinical orthodoxy and is very critical of traditional treatment models. David briefly describes some of the services he and Dan set up in Melbourne...
4th February 2025

Treatment vs. Recovery: David Best

Whilst working at the National Addiction Centre and later being head of research for the National Treatment Agency (NTA), David unhappily watched the industrialisation of addiction treatment. The industry paid a lot of mortgages and supported many people’s career development, but it didn’t benefit of the people who needed help.
4th February 2025

Beyond the Individual: David Best

David describes two important aims for recovery communities or groups: Can the connectedness of recovery communities inspire similar changes more broadly across the wider community? Can they be the glue or the inspiration for re-engaging a range of excluded and marginalised groups and individuals? Wulf reminds us that treatment is too transactional.
4th February 2025

Nature of Recovery Communities: David Best

When David and colleagues run their Inclusive Recovery Cities workshops, they encourage individuals and groups to engage with four quadrants: sport, art and recreation; employment, training and education; volunteering and community involvement, and mutual aid and recovery...
4th February 2025

Recovery Capital: David Best

One of the reasons for working with recovery capital is that it gave David and colleagues a metric, something they could use to count things that were meaningful in a person’s life, positive things that people would want to achieve in their recovery journey. Tools to measure outcomes of treatment only focused on the reduction...
4th February 2025

The Power of Stories: Saffron Roberts

When you share your story, and listen to other people’s stories, you realise that they have part of your story in theirs, and vice versa. This helps you identify with, and connect to, these other people. We kind of earn our seats at ‘the table’ with the pain and suffering we’ve been through. We connect in meetings through our suffering.
3rd February 2025

Gary Rutherford’s ARC Fitness Journey

As some of you know, I had such a special time when I visited ARC Fitness last May. I fell in love with the city and the people there. As for ARC Fitness... Wow! Just an amazing recovery initiative.  And I was humbled by both the reception and kindness I received. Here are links to my two blog posts about my trip, along with a short film...
29th January 2025

The Dynamic Spread of Happiness

Happy people tended to be located in the centre of their local social networks and in large clusters of happy people. The happiness of an individual was associated with the happiness of people up to three degrees removed in the social network (e.g. to the friends of their friends’ friends). People who were surrounded by...
28th January 2025

The Voyage to Recovery: Lucke Gabriel (2)

‘We all help each other out in difficult times, and it’s really nice to hear their stories and experiences and sort of try to relate to what they have been through. It’s very good to feel you’re not alone, and that you can open up to these people and not feel judged. I feel a lot more...'
27th January 2025

The Voyage to Recovery: Lucke Gabriel (1)

Filming and editing ‘The Voyage to Recovery,’ which told the story of seven young service users of Adferaid Recovery in North Wales sailing on the Faramir off the south coast of England, has been one of Lucke’s favourite Eternal Media experiences.
22nd January 2025

‘The Connected Community’: Cormac Russell and John McKnight

The alternative path to community development, Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD), focuses on a community’s assets, capacities, and abilities. Significant community development takes places only when local community people are committed to investing in...
21st January 2025

Community Building: Cormac Russell

The alternative path to community development focuses on a community’s assets, capacities and abilities. Historic evidence indicates that significant community development takes places only when local community people are committed to investing in themselves and their resources. Communities are built bottom-up, not top-down. ABCD empowers individuals and communities.
20th January 2025

My Journey: From Brain Chemicals to Human Connection

An ongoing serialised account of my career, with an emphasis on describing my activities and the people who have inspired me since I closed down my university neuroscience laboratory in 2000 and started a community initiative (Wired In) focused on empowering people to...
16th January 2025

Recovery in Focus: Jill Whittingham (3)

‘I feel like the lessons that are learned in Recovery in Focus don't just apply to people in recovery from addiction. They apply to people in all aspects of their life when they are seeking to have a bit more agency and control in their actions.’ There are ‘therapeutic’ lessons that Lucke... has applied to his own life.
15th January 2025

Recovery in Focus: Jill Whittingham (2)

Recovery in Focus can be a new network for people who have a common interest in wanting to move on from their addiction and find long-term recovery. Each week, whether in the classroom or out on location, Jill illustrates the importance of connectivity, and building a network, by using a ball of string. This exercise has become a key...