Saturday is time to revisit my favourite old blogs from the website. Here’s one of the most viewed from last year.
‘William White describes how somewhere in the process of the professionalisation of addiction treatment in the US, treatment got disconnected from the larger more enduring process of long-term recovery.
He points out that we are recycling large numbers of people through repeated episodes of treatment. Their problems are so severe and recovery capital so low, there is little hope that brief episodes of treatment will be successful. We end up blaming them for failing to overcome their problems.
What Bill talks about is just as relevant to Australia and the UK. Check out my blog.
For those of you who do not know Bill White, he is the world’s most prolific writer about addiction recovery, as reflected on his website. He is also an historian, researcher, practitioner and recoveree.
Bill’s sustained contributions to the field have been acknowledged by a number of awards. 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. The Johnson Institute recently published Bill’s widely read papers on recovery advocacy in a book entitled Let’s Go Make Some History: Chronicles of the New Addiction Recovery Advocacy Movement. His book Pathways from the Culture of Addiction to the Culture of Recovery is another seminal piece of writing.’
