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sible under Public Health England for
drug and alcohol treatment, take com-
pletely the opposite view. They claim they
are not ‘assured’ we provide suitable
advice, although they have no evidence
whatsoever to back this up. In fact the
people who attend our groups give
excellent feedback to the NHS on how
beneficial they have found our support.
I have challenged the local authority
on why they have (seemingly without a
shred of evidence) kept us outside the
treatment loop in East Yorkshire, and
received no response. We have even
been funded by the lottery! They have
also excluded us from their quarterly
treatment forum, again for no apparent
reason. I rather suspect this is all
politically motivated. There are no other
user support groups in most of East
Yorkshire. In fact I referred someone to
the East Riding Alcohol Aftercare service
recently for some 1:1 support. They can’t
take anyone else on for a ‘few weeks’.
I would have thought any voluntary
user support would be most welcome.
Apparently not. I wonder if any other
readers have experienced similar
obstacles?
Stephen Keane, chair, Alcohol Support
Project East Yorkshire
FIRST-RATE LESSON
When I started working at the drug and
alcohol inpatient unit I was told that
one of my responsibilities would be to
deliver the doctor’s information group.
My immediate thought was this sounds
really interesting but I also felt a bit
apprehensive as I didn’t have any
experience of this kind of teaching.
Isn’t it interesting how during medical
training we only really get to see people
on a one-to-one basis or with their
relatives present?
Seeing a group of service users
together to give direct education would
have been something of a rarity despite
the emphasis nowadays on public
health and preventative medicine. I
started to feel more anxious over the
prospect of delivering the group but
didn’t have much time to ruminate as
the first Friday soon approached. I had
decided to talk about the link between
substance misuse and mental health. I
was struck by how honest the service
users were about their personal
experiences and my feelings of
nervousness quickly diminished. There
were a couple of occasions where I had
to intervene as people were talking
over each other, but apart from that it
went smoothly.
It was interesting for me to see the
group dynamics and I made some
mental notes for the next week.
Something else that became apparent
to me during the group was that
despite being able to identify many
negative consequences of substance
misuse this had not prevented them
from becoming dependent. I would
strongly recommend the experience of
conducting groups to any trainee doctor
and I feel privileged to have been given
this opportunity.
Dr Tanya Walton, CT3 psychiatry doctor
WRONG DIRECTION
I read Ingrid van Beek’s article with
interest (‘A fine balance’, November,
page 18). I think all these ‘rooms’ will
do is to allow clients to view this as
‘extra gear’ or a ‘side-order’ of drugs in
addition to what they will continue to
use in any case, thus increasing the
extent of their habits. It may well work
with other types of intravenous
substance misusers, but not opiate
dependents, in my opinion.
There will also be ‘diversion’ of the
clinical drugs issued onto others it was
not intended for, a bit like the way
communities are awash with street
buprenorphine and methadone present-
ly. I recently home-visited a client and
he had accumulated six litres of
methadone, stored in a kitchen cup-
board! I once worked for a community
drug service where 92 per cent of
those clients already supposedly
engaged with structured treatment
journeys were still attending for
needles, and with little motivation to
change.
I can see it may help with the
current harm reduction/maintenance
philosophy, but for those of us working
with an abstinence based model of
treatment, this policy is of very little
help, as experienced by the detrimental
consequences of these ‘rooms’
throughout the Netherlands.
Neil Angus, drugs project worker and
former heroin addict
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Letters |
Voices of recovery
December 2013 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| 17
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
In
DDN
’s November issue Alex Boyt shared
some of his thoughts on the ‘R’word and this
prompted much discussion on social media
among the recovery community. It would be
interesting to know if something similar
happened within services. While Alex,
tongue located somewhere in his cheek, has
a poke at the ‘purple t-shirt’ brigade (we’re
fully signed-up members) and the ‘warm
fuzzy feelings’ found at recovery gatherings,
it seems to us that he is principally ‘venting’
about services/commissioners and their
interpretation of ‘recovery’.
Alex is a SU coordinator in central London. In his article he refers to
commissioners, the NTA, Theresa May and the PHE strategic recovery lead.
We believe (and we met with Alex to talk about his piece) that he is asking
some important questions: has the mass importing of recovery ‘rhetoric’
into the drug field and the establishment of recovery plans/ champions/
pathfinders /colleges/ trees
etc
resulted in services that are more recovery-
oriented? Do new recovery-branded services ‘speak’ to the most ‘disadvant-
aged, traumatised and neglected’? Or are they serving a politicised neo-
liberal agenda (one recovery agenda among many) that increasingly
commodifies support and people and, as Alex suggests, uses a ‘recovery
agenda’ to categorise SUs as ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’? These are uncom-
fortable questions, and we thank Alex for having the courage to ask them.
However, we’re not sure that reducing the vast diversity of ‘recovery’
found in communities to purple-clad ‘happy-clappy’ individuals who enjoy
a hug and a ‘hurrah’ is the best way to highlight important service issues.
Sorry Alex. There is clearly away to go beforewe can happily sit back and say
we have recovery-oriented services, just as there ismuchwork to be done by
community members to increase access to inclusive recovery networks that
support wellbeing. But – and it’s a big but – there is evidence, and lots of it
(check out the 2007 Foresight study,
Mental capital and wellbeing
) that
wellbeing is generated and sustained through opportunities to be active,
learn, take notice, connect and give (the ‘five ways to wellbeing’).
Most of the opportunities to do this can be found in what Edgar Cahn
calls the ‘core economy’: family, neighbourhood and community. People
have been finding their version of recovery, abstinent or otherwise, in the
core economy for decades, centuries, long before services came along. The
emerging recovery movement (in drugs and mental health) has started to
make the core economy more visible in recognition of its increasing
importance. Five thousand people on a recovery walk, many of them
marginalised in the past, and 50 recovery events in recovery month is
evidence of something, as is the emergence of new recovery communities
all over the UK.
We need to work together to support new communities, encourage
more traffic between them and widen the doors. We are all in this together
and we believe, if we are going to find new ways of responding to old
problems, we need to have more faith in the capacity of people within
communities to define and shape their own recovery.
‘Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase,
just take the first step’ – Martin Luther King, Jr.
The authors are directors of the UK Recovery Federation (UKRF)
VOICES OF RECOVERY
SEEING PURPLE
Last month Alex Boyt took the recovery
movement to task.
Alistair Sinclair
,
Richard Maunders
and
Melody Treasure
of the UKRF respond