After more than 35 years of time spent in alcohol and drug services and research, I have now taken my work pension and ‘retired’. I will continue to do some odd bits of research and will stay actively involved with recovery communities and in particular, North Wales Recovery Communities and Sober Snowdonia. I hope over time, to write at length about some of these experiences. Having just enjoyed the first two months of mostly ‘downing tools’, I wanted to start with a few headline reflections on some of the things I feel at the end of this journey.
I have seen a genuine growth in the diversity and number of recovery communities during this time. In 1990, outside of fellowship meetings and residential therapeutic communities, there was little obvious visible sense of recovery communities in 1990. Today, this is far from the case. Recovery communities are flourishing.
This said, some things remain disappointingly unchanged. I will begin with these pessimistic bits before finishing with an optimistic view.
The alcohol and drug landscape continues to remain dominated by policy and practice seeking to ‘treat’ people. Despite the oft heard phrase – ‘it is easy to get off and much harder to stay off’ – we still have a world where the vast majority of all monies are allocated to ‘treatment’ with recovery literally living ‘off the crumbs on the table’. Psychiatry and nursing remain the dominant voices. Being running a hard second by a punishment and criminal justice orientation.
Connected to this is still a degree of dismissing the value of peer-led roles or services. Often couched in terms of not being ‘professional’ or ‘qualified’. While there is increasing numbers of those with lived experience involved in ‘treatment’ delivery, these individuals are often considered supplementary to the professional and as such are undervalued or in under-paid, and even non-paid, roles. Recovery (and lived experience) has all too often (and increasingly) been used by huge national organisations as a means to gain all the little allocation of monies for recovery within their larger treatment and criminal justice budgets. Thus, enabling them to collect more contracts, and as a means of cutting down on cost, and without any truly genuine commitment to wholesale radical change.
The evidence base and policy positions remain dominated by a focus on the outputs of treatment or service delivery, rather than the outcomes of sustained lifestyle changes. All of this reflects that alcohol and drug use continues to be primarily framed as personal behavioural failings within criminal justice and health considerations, rather than better understood as the way in which individuals try to cope with economic, educational, social injustice concerns, and traumatic experiences.
Despite this depressing maintenance of the status quo, I am buoyed by the changes I have seen. Recovery is much more visible than it once was. Communities abound, conferences happen, people walk en masse in purple, and the research evidence grows.
Many people now understand recovery not just as the process of giving up or significantly changing substance use, but also that of building positive and meaningful lives, connecting, engaging, and giving back. When I am in a room full of recovery folk, and this now happens often, there is an abundance of buzz, hope, and love.
Our recent work in mapping out the diversity of recovery organisations within Scotland for the Scottish Recovery Consortium, illustrates this positive see change. https://scottishrecoveryconsortium.org/recovery-in-scotland/
As AA approaches 100 years of existence and is still going strong, and NA conventions abound in rooms full of extensive clean time, the landscape is also now filled with many groups helping individuals build and maintain more rewarding recovery lifestyles. These groups are often led and run by those already in recovery. As well as a lot of 12-Step and other behavioural support activity, they also do brilliant stuff like cook and eat; mountains and wild swimming; gardening and allotments; cinema and bowling trips; music and dance groups, park runs and boxercise; recovery games and football tournaments, fishing and climbing, and so much more. This is the sprinkling of gold or fairy dust, the magic that spreads connection.
There is now so much more hope beyond, and with a chance of ending, the revolving doors of the treatment and criminal justice systems.