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Lost Vision: Addiction Counseling as Community Organization

NCJ Number
197948
Journal
Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly Volume: 19 Issue: 4 Dated: 2001 Pages: 1-32
Author(s)
William L. White M.A.
Date Published
2001
Length
32 pages
Annotation
This article explores the relationship between addiction treatment, recovery, and experiences in the community.
Abstract
Recovery should be re-conceptualized as something that happens in the community rather than solely within the context of professional treatment. A reconstruction of addiction counseling is proposed to claim its social activist and social movement roots. These roots were lost in the professionalization of the role of addiction counselor and the industrialization, commercialization, and regulation of addiction treatment. In the future, many addiction treatment institutions will place themselves fully within the culture of recovery and redefine their role in that culture. This new role will focus on removing personal and environmental obstacles to recovery; encouraging the diversity and viability of support structures within the culture of recovery; and educating clients and families about the addiction and recovery processes. The new role will also focus on serving as “community guides” to link clients to support structures within the culture of recovery; responding to the needs of clients with acultural styles of recovery; and developing chronic disease management protocol for relapse-prone, multiple-problem clients and their families. There are factors that inhibit and promote addiction that co-exist at different levels of intensity in the individual, in the nuclear and extended family, in the immediate ecosystem (peers, neighborhood, school), and in the larger macrosystem (State, country, world). These factors combine with other demographic and clinical characteristics to create quite varied patterns of alcohol- and other drug-related problems. This model calls for interventions at all levels of this ecosystem that increase inhibiting factors and decrease promoting factors. Agencies must find ways to rejoin communities and discover the healing powers that lie within these communities. 4 notes, 64 references