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The recovery revolution: news from the front
William White, Senior Research Consultant, Chestnut Health Systems, Bloomington, USA
Abstract
Addiction treatment in the United States has been historically delivered through a high intensity acute care model providing brief bio psychosocial stabilization and a low-intensity palliative care model promising sustained metabolic stabilization as a treatment for opioid addiction. Both have focused on the personal pathologies and social costs that could be subtracted from the lives of those treated. Recent evaluations reveal serious flaws in both models related to attraction; access; retention; service scope, quality and dose; and high rates of post-treatment relapse and re-admission.
The acute and palliative care models are being challenged by an emerging vision and model of sustained recovery management whose services span the stages of pre-recovery engagement, recovery initiation and stabilization, recovery maintenance and enhanced quality of personal and family life in long-term recovery. The focus of recovery management is on what can be added to the! lives of individuals, families and communities through the auspices of professional-directed treatment and peer-based recovery support services. The contexts for this shift include the growth, diversification, and cultural/political awakening of American communities of recovery; emergence of recovery as an organizing paradigm; professional efforts to build "recovery-oriented systems of care;" and advocacy for a recovery-focused research agenda.
This presentation will briefly review the history and status of this movement in the United States to transform systems of care for individuals and families wounded by alcohol and other drug problems.
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Biography
William ("Bill") White is a Senior Research Consultant at Chestnut Health Systems, past-chair of the board of Recovery Communities United and a volunteer consultant to Faces and Voices of Recovery. He has a Master's degree in Addiction Studies from Goddard College and has worked full time in the addictions field since 1969 as a street worker, counselor, clinical director, trainer and researcher. Bill has authored or co-authored more than 300 articles, monographs, research reports and book chapters and 14 books. His book, Slaying the Dragon - The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America, received the McGovern Family Foundation Award for the best book on addiction recovery.
Bill's sustained contributions to the treatment field in the United States have been acknowledged by awards from the National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers, the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, NAADAC: The Association of Addiction Professionals, the American Society of Addiction Medicine, and the Native American Wellbriety Movement. His widely read papers on recovery advocacy were recently published in the book Let's Go Make Some History: Chronicles of the New Addiction Recovery Advocacy Movement. His latest publication is a monograph entitled Recovery Management and Recovery-oriented Systems of Care: Scientific Rationale and Promising Practices.
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