In Monday’s blog post, Wulf introduced you to the Zoom conversation he had late last year with David Best, Professor of Addiction Recovery and Director of the Centre for Addiction Recovery Research (CARR), at Leeds Trinity University. He provided a link to David’s People page that was launched that day. This latter page contains links to the 10 main films (totalling just over 64 minutes) edited from their Recovery Voices conversation, along with written summaries. This was an enthralling conversation packed with lots of important information.
I have also edited the conversation into short (generally less than three minutes) Theme clips which are available in total as a YouTube Playlist (27 films, totalling just under an hour). Here are the individual films that make up this Playlist, along with a link and a short summary for each individual film.
1. Sprinkling Magic Dust [2’36”]
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 the lives of the people who needed help. David felt that his colleagues were operating under the illusion that they were ‘sprinkling magic dust’ on the heads of their clients that would inoculate them for the next week or two, until they came back. David Best is Professor of Addiction Recovery, and Director of the Centre for Addiction Recovery Research (CARR), at Leeds Trinity University. 10 February 2025.
2. Contrasting Scotland and England [1’51”]
The two countries approach addiction recovery from two very different perspectives. Scotland’s policy grew out of the strengths-based approach of the Scottish Mental Health Recovery Network. England’s approach was based on the perceived failures of a harm reduction treatment approach with many people ‘parked’ on methadone and never leaving treatment, underpinned by the counting of numbers entering treatment services without subsequently exiting.
3. Being Totally Inspired [2’09”]
David was invited to an inspirational 12-Step graduation ceremony at HM Prison Lancaster Farms, where he witnessed a level of emotional intensity and gratitude, along with a collective feeling of empowerment and belonging, that he had never seen whilst working at the so-called centre for excellence, the National Addiction Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry. He then attended a talk given by leading US recovery advocate William White at the Scottish Parliament, which he describes as revolutionary to his thinking and understanding of recovery.
4. Recovery Groups – Being Imaginative [1’55”]
There is some incredible stuff going on across the UK, but people in the next town don’t know about it. The activities which form the foundation of a recovery group, such as walking in the mountains or playing football, are dependent on social networks, context, assets and resources in a particular community or neighbourhood. What’s good for one town may not be suitable for another.
5. Hope & Excitement vs. Fragmented Chaos [1’56”]
In 2008, there was a real feeling of hope and excitement in Scotland with the Road to Recovery policy. The Scottish Drugs Service Recovery Consortium acted as a catalyst for a lot of recovery-related activity. The situation was very different in England, where there was much less recovery-related activity.
6. Spray on Recovery [2’49”]
David believes that the English system remains ‘all show and no action’ in regards to recovery. He and Wulf discuss some of the insidious things that happen in the field. Services that: use all-encompassing names to hoover up money; use the word ‘recovery’ without changing their way of operating; hire people in early recovery (paid or as volunteers) in a tokenistic manner, and then leave them dangerously isolated and not supported.
7. Why Work in the Recovery Field? [3’19”]
David says that he eventually decided to work in the recovery field, rather than continue working in the addiction treatment field, in part because only one was good for his health. Moreover, when he asked people at a UKESAD conference if they would fill in a questionnaire about their recovery, he was overwhelmed by their response. Several of his best friends, and people he most admires and respects, are in long-term recovery and it is a wonderful world of hope and trust to work in.
8. An Uncomfortable Journey [2’11”]
It’s been hard going from being one of Sir John Strang’s protégés, and the youngest senior Lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry at the time, to not wanting to be part of the treatment system anymore. Since he moved out of the addiction field, he has felt very much an outsider. It has been easier continuing his work in Criminology departments.
9. Moving to Australia [2’34”]
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, including the Recovery Academy which was hosted at Turning Point.
10. Being Savaged in Australia [3’06”]
When he moved to Australia, David was absolutely savaged by Alex Wodak and other harm reductionists for being a carrier of that ‘evil disease of recovery’, which was seen as a right-wing conspiracy to reduce spending on drug treatment. Social identity theory gave David a useful framework for shaping some of his recovery work. He started to engage with people like William White and Robert Granfield in the US.
11. Why Measure Recovery Capital? [2’58”]
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 of symptoms or deficits. People in a methadone maintenance clinic may be less likely to die, to get arrested and to get a blood borne virus, but their quality of life generally goes down.
12. Measuring Something Life-Changing [2’33”]
The writing of a paper on recovery capital with Alexandre Laudet for the Royal Society for the Arts in 2010 was the beginning of 14 years of David’s work developing and refining measures and metrics based around recovery capital. Wulf emphasises that the essence of the work David has been doing is that there is something beyond treatment that is more important. The positive life-changing aspects of recovery as the person grows and evolves.
13. Second Chance Opportunities [2’10”]
This initiative in Albany, New York, is a recovery housing organisation and social enterprise janitorial service. Their philosophy is that in your first year of recovery you work as a cleaner of office buildings, a job that helps you avoid mixing with people who are not in recovery. The job isn’t going to cause you stress or lead you to temptation. After that, the recovering person can focus on their vocation and career. It is very much predicated on the idea that recovery is a phased, long-term project of personal, social and community growth.
14. The Need For Inspirational Peer Guide & Mentors? [1’43”]
William White argues that we need to create a system where you go to recovery services first and then subsequently engage with specialist acute treatment services, i.e. recovery precedes treatment and not the other way around. Wulf agrees that a recovering person needs their peers beside them before they access treatment and after receiving specialist acute care (treatment). David points out that whilst you need an inspirational peer guide/mentor before you go anywhere near a clinical service, you may also need them ‘holding your hand’ while you are accessing such specialist care to keep you engaged in the bigger picture and to provide that sense of connection and hope.
15. Chesterfield County Jail [1’38”]
One exciting place that David has visited is Chesterfield County Jail in Virginia, where they have a Therapeutic Community (TC) in the jail. None of the staff decide who can go into the TC or get chucked out; it’s all peer-based decision making. What’s more, when people graduate from the drug programme in the jail, they go into one of three recovery houses in the community in Richmond. They also go back into the jail one day a week to continue the TC programme and carry the message about what it is like in the outside world, so it becomes a dynamic system of support and engagement.
16. Soap With Hope [0’51”]
David praises Chris Sylvester and his Getting Clean recovery initiative, located in Leeds. Getting Clean is a social enterprise for soap making. ‘Recovery soap, soap with hope, fighting crime and grime one bar at a time.’ Chris runs workshops in prisons and they organise soap-making events. He employs a number of people people who are also a part of the Leeds recovery community.
17. Four Quadrants of Recovery [2’00”]
David summarises the evidence from research about what is important for recovery: jobs, friends and houses, or somewhere to live, someone to love, and something to do. When he and his 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 groups. They argue for involvement in at least one item of each of these four sectors.
18. You Can’t Prescribe or Commission Recovery [1’52”]
Wulf says you cannot prescribe fixed things for a recovery initiative, like you can for a methadone clinic, but you need to have things that ensure that people help other people, and that address practical issues that people have, such as housing and jobs. You also can’t commission recovery…. But you can commission many of the conditions that allow recovery to flourish.
19. The ‘Hub and Spoke’ of a Recovery Community [2’58”]
A wide variety of activities can be arranged in a central hub that can facilitate recovery. It’s important to bring in outside organisations that have nothing to do with recovery, and also get people out of their normal environment. In the early days of recovery, it is good to spend a good deal of time with other people in recovery. However, if someone several years down the line has no social networks outside their recovery world, then something has gone badly wrong.
20. Be Careful Overgeneralising [2’43”]
David emphasises that one of the dangers of recovery stuff in the UK is we sometimes forget that most of the population we are dealing with is mainly white, working class male, in the 30-50 year age group, and experiencing problems with alcohol or opiates. He gives examples that challenge generalised views.
21. Knowing More About Recovery [2’13”]
Wulf points out that we know an awful lot more about recovery, and recovery groups and communities, then we did 20 years ago. David describes his main recovery capital measuring instrument, REC-CAP, has now been used with 20,000 people. He talks about the Yellow Ribbon Prison Run in Singapore, an initiative focused on giving inmates and ex-offenders a second change to turn their lives around and contribute to society, attracting 9,000 participants.
22. A Strengths-Based Revolution [1’07”]
David argues that points out that need to think much more about the crossover to mental health and to criminal justice. We should maybe stop thinking so much about recovery as a movement or a phenomenon, but as part of a kind of strengths-based revolution in social sciences. Wulf agrees that facilitating recovery is about long-term, localised, hard graft. It is centred and grounded in communities.
23. Being a Passionate Recovery Champion [2’33”]
David believes that you can’t be a recovery academic in the same way you can be an addiction academic. Traditional academic metrics don’t really work in the recovery field. You must be a passionate champion of recovery, an activist. The big question is how do we communicate out to the field what we do? He believes there needs to be more online courses, blogs and podcasts relating to recovery.
24. Don’t Just Focus on the Individual [2’12”]
David mentions William White quoting two small qualitative studies that showed when fathers achieved sustainable recovery, their sons had better scholastic engagement, attendance and milestone achievement. David thinks that we make a mistake if we use an outcome metric that only focuses on the individual; we must consider the wider impact of a person’s recovery.
25. Collective Efficacy [3’06”]
In his book The Great American City, Robert Sampson uses the term collective efficacy, which refers to two things. One is social cohesion in communities, and the second is shared expectations about the likelihood of your neighbours getting involved in pro-social activities, like stopping somebody graffitiing. David wants to use collective efficacy as the outcomes and evaluation metric for Inclusive Recovery Cities.
26. A Challenge to Orthodoxy [2’10”]
Much of this Recovery Voices Conversation has been about challenging orthodoxy, or reclaiming some orthodoxy. 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. The power of recovery is that it is transformational.
27. No Longer the Young Person [0’25”]
A bit of fun at the end of this Recovery Voices conversation between Wulf Livingston and David Best.
David’s Theme Clip YouTube Playlist
Biography:
David Best is Professor of Addiction Recovery, and Director of the Centre for Addiction Recovery Research (CARR), at Leeds Trinity University. He holds various other senior academic posts internationally. He is a founding member of the College of Lived Experience Recovery Organisations (LEROs) in the UK and of the Inclusive Recovery Cities movement.
Trained as a psychologist and criminologist, he has worked in practice, research and policy in the areas of addiction recovery and rehabilitation of offenders. He has authored or co-edited seven books on addiction recovery and desistance from offending, and has written more than 240 peer-reviewed journal publications and around 70 book chapters and technical reports. He is one of the leading academics in the area of addiction recovery and a key innovator in developing recovery capital measurement tools and methods.