Recovery from opiate addiction without treatment: A summary.

The CHANGE Study: Methods and Sample Description for a Cross-Sectional Study of Heroin Cessation in New York City

“…Groundbreaking studies in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s provided mostly descriptive data on the natural history of drug abuse with samples drawn from drug abuse treatment and the criminal justice system. 9,12,22,[38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46] Natural recovery is less well studied, 11,13,14,31,47 especially recently, and data are sparse on the factors associated with sustained heroin cessation, particularly among street-recruited samples. The CHANGE Study focused on cessation of heroin use specifically, as opposed to cessation of all drugs or cessation of drug injection for three primary reasons.…”

“…27 Researchers who have examined it often contend that natural recovery is not an uncommon phenomenon, but previous research efforts appear to have been biased by (1) the large body of research on treatment outcomes [28][29][30] where the sampling was in treatment settings which by definition takes individuals who have not recovered spontaneously and (2) the difficulty in finding people who have stopped using heroin on their own. 31 The CHANGE (Cessation of Heroin: A Neighborhood Grounded Exploration) Study aimed to understand factors associated with the initiation and maintenance of sustained heroin cessation from the perspective of users themselves and specifically set out to document the correlates of natural recovery. Here, we describe the methods for the CHANGE Study and provide a brief description of the study sample.…”

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“…It is true that as a lifestyle becomes more ingrained it takes on the character of a personality trait. However, dramatic changes have been observed in lifestyle behavior, as exemplified by research on spontaneous recovery from heavy substance abuse (Biernacki, 1990; Ludwig, 1985), something that would not occur if lifestyles were a personality trait. Finally, lifestyles are not synonymous with self.…”

Does Taking Steps to Control One's Drug Use Predict Entry into Treatment?

“…Natural recovery, or spontaneous remission, is when an AOD user stops using without treatment (13). The process of natural recovery from opiate addiction is often done in a stepwise fashion, much like how the stages of change model is described (14). Furthermore, natural recovery is an area of research that consists of dynamic processes and needs further research to be understood completely (15).…”