As CEO of THOMAS and Executive Director of DI, I feel honoured to link our new service to THOMAS; all profits from this service will go directly into supporting the THOMAS Charity.
Recovery is rapidly transforming the drug and alcohol treatment landscape to the extent that it is possible to use the term as a smoke screen. Or should I say, to mask the complexity of the problems, still associated in the development of people who embrace the recovery door with so much hope for a better future. A significant paradigm shift is taking place within the world of commissioning that is fundamentally different today than it was five years ago or even three years ago. The most profound difference is that we have come to believe that recovery is the white knight that comes to the rescue.
I have no doubt that it is a contributory liberating factor unlocking the potential people have to escape from the obsessive compulsive behaviours and lost opportunities. Yet it is easy to confuse the merely first stages of recovery with the genuine sustainability factor needed for social mobility. There is no doubt that the peer dynamic concept can help people manoeuvre from the cul-de-sac of despair on to the road of transformational change and yes the group dynamic programme can alter and expand the limiting mindset of irrational beliefs and behaviours by embracing the incremental process of a new beginning, but the reinvention of people with protracted histories of criminality and addiction is more than a three month, six month or even 12 month programme, especially in the current economic climate of the survival of the fittest.
The scientific evidence measuring long term social mobility success of recovery programmes is still weak, inconsistent and almost non-existent within credible research journals, especially in the measurement of the sustainability factor with prolific offenders embracing social mobility five years on after the drug and alcohol recovery programmes have ended. This is most notable with individuals who have low self-esteem and turbulent backgrounds of institutionalism. The best we can hope for is weak methodology from an American culture radically different from our own with an insufficient critique of research findings. This is not helped by the fact that there is still not a unifying scientific theory of recovery.
As someone who has led a recovery community for over 10 years with an empirical evidence base of cultivating a culture of recovery leaders with the five a year sustainability factor of successful social mobility, nurtured from the prison gate and now climbing a professional ladder of success, I feel proud in what we have achieved. However, I also see the many faces of people accessing our drop-in-centre each day who represent the chronically excluded, lost in a word of inner turmoil, devastation and confusion. Recovery is an alien environment for many of these people. Commissioning can be hampered by cognitive limits when dealing with complexity. The complex individuals are a heavy burden on criminal justice and health care budgets. They remind us that one size does not fit all. Equally some of those who have completed recovery programmes can still be entangled with complexity.
A recovery culture is a complex environment because it can be hard to predict what will happen. We need to differentiate a recovery programme from a recovery culture. A recovery programme is clearly defined, it is time bound with clear goals, rules and expectations. A recovery culture is timeless and ambiguous because it is made up of diverse interpretations. Although it is the product of the programme, it operates outside the service that delivers the programme and it moves from a homogenous controlled thinking environment into an ultimately divergent thinking process. A recovery culture is imbued with features that may operate in patterned ways but the multiplicity of interdependence and perception diversity only adds to the complexity