Blog

I hadn't felt like this before; it felt like a bad dose of flu. A friend came around and I had a line of heroin from him. All of a sudden I felt fine. My heart just sank as the penny dropped. ‘Oh my god, I'm addicted!’ I carried on using...

'She had done exactly what I was doing, and she had gotten through it. It was a Light Bulb Moment. From that moment on, I didn’t feel so alone. For the first time, I was with a group of people who understood me and my addiction, and I understood and related to them...’

Rob emphasises that he was the sort of person who would say, ‘Sod that, I’m off!’, if he was asked to do something he didn’t like. But now he loves it when they try to push each other into trying new things. And if there...

In the third year of my psychology degree at university in the mid-1970s, I did not know whether I wanted to go on to study clinical psychology, or conduct research in laboratory rats focused on gaining insights into how our brain functions, in order to help people overcome...

During her early days at Penrhyn House, Lianne was so negative towards herself. She'd never been around a group of people who cared about her and wanted her to get well. The people at Penrhyn loved her when she...

You will learn how Rob developed a love of the mountains, became a mountain guide, and set up Sober Snowdonia. Lianne describes her love of the outdoors and becoming an ultra-marathon participant. In the film...

She went into communities in Central Queensland and she sat down. She listened. For 5 years - from 1993 to 1998 - she gathered the lived stories of families and communities who had endured not just one generation of trauma, but layers of it. Dispossession. Violence. Removal.

I have now finished the book I have been writing since last year, Transforming Pain Into Power: The Story of North Wales Recovery Communities. The book will be published by New Generation Publishing in the near future. Writing the book, which is over 500 pages long, has been quite a...

The story of the growth of Cocaine Anonymous in Scotland illustrates a recurring historical pattern...

The main part of my writing has been a book entitled 'Transforming Pain Into Power: The Story of North Wales Recovery Communities'. The project has been quite a journey, not only involving the writing but also multiple interviews over Zoom with various people at NWRC...

‘… Recovering people need empathy and TLC (Tender Loving Care). Rapport with the patient is key to helping them recover. In my opinion, good rapport should be a given working in this field—it is what I experienced...

It was and still is an incredibly surreal moment in a very strange life that I’m experiencing. My life seems to have gone from one extreme to another and I’m so very grateful for the few people who never gave up on me when I was a homeless addict, they saved my life and...

Here are links to five separate short films, the first focusing on the speech given by Gary Rutherford in Ebrington Square before we set off. There follows three films of the actual walk through the city, which ended up back at our start point after we crossed the Peace Bridge.

I had a wonderful time in North Wales visiting old friends at North Wales Recovery Communities (NWRC) in Bangor and Eternal Media in Wrexham, and met lots of new friends, some of whom I have been communicating with via Zoom. I would take this opportunity to thank James...

I will be giving a talk at 19.00-21.00 on 12 September in Penrhyn Hall, the Council building in Bangor. Most of the talk will be different to the one I gave at Bwyd Da Bangor last year. You can see the film made by Eternal Media of that talk here. The second part of that talk focused on...