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drinkanddrugsnews
| July 2014
Cover story |
Recovery
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
The British recovery movement
has a vital role to play in looking
for ‘the good, the true and the
beautiful’ in our deficit-based
society, says
Alistair Sinclair
‘A people are as healthy and
confident as the stories they tell
themselves. Sick storytellers can
make their nations sick. And sick
nations make for sick storytellers.’
Ben Okri, Birds of Heaven.
This was a quote I threw into the room when I presented to DDN’s national
service user conference in Birmingham in February – because I believe we live in
a sick nation, full to the brim with sick storytellers who dominate our mainstream
media and political discourse.
It’s a reflection of the deficit world we live in. A world of needs and gaps and
experts that is increasingly apportioning blame to the other, the alien, the
vulnerable, the undeserving poor, whether that be the Muslim, the immigrant, the
benefit scrounger, the homeless or the drug user.
We live in times of great fear and anxiety, times of austerity, and this
narrative, this story, now permeates every aspect of our lives. The wealthy and
privileged, rather interestingly, have got richer during these times as they’ve
retreated even further into their gilded gated communities. Meanwhile the poor
have got poorer and the ‘squeezed middle’, those hard-working families, anxiously
scrabble to hold on in this era of zero-hour contracts, flexible working and
creeping neo-liberal privatisation.
We live in interesting times, and in Birmingham I offered a perspective that
I’m sharing with you now. It’s a perspective that seeks to place ‘recovery’ within
a historical context, and position the future British ‘recovery movement’ as
something with the potential to be positive, inclusive and, rooted in the promotion
of social justice, truly transformative.
I’ll start with a little recovery history. There are many who recognise recovery
as a term within the 12-step movement going back 79 years, and others who
think it popped into treatment land with the drug strategy in 2010. As Larry
Davidson from Yale University illustrates in
The Roots of the Recovery Movement
in Psychiatry
(2010), recovery’s roots as a service orientation (putting aside
recovery within communities for hundreds of years) can be traced back to 1793
and the groundbreaking work of Philippe Pinel and Jean-Baptiste Pussin.
In recognising the importance of mutual aid and a meaningful life, giving jobs
to the inmates of a Paris asylum, Pinel and Pussin lay the foundations of the
peer support we see today. In the US, Dorothea Dix (1840), a tireless advocate
for the mentally ill within prisons and Jane Addams (1889), the founder of the
resettlement movement, were instrumental in advancing the notion that healthy
environments promote health, and their work emphasised the key importance of
‘living with’ and ‘doing with’ in communities as opposed to the usual default
‘While we have been
encouraged to focus
on the “canaries in the
mine”, those who are the
first visible casualties of
a sick society, fixing them
and returning them to
productive life, we have
been discouraged,
interestingly, from looking
at the mine itself...’
the w
Catching