The recovery movement and its implications for policy, commissioning and practice

Abstract

While a recovery approach is widespread and relatively unquestioned in the USA, its implementation in the UK and to a lesser extent in Australia has provoked a number of questions about what this means in practice and what some of the implications are for treatment. This is particularly important as there is growing interest in recovery in Western Europe with policy recognition in Belgium and the Netherlands, and increased interest in research issues around recovery.\ud \ud What this article sets out to do is to discuss the implications of a recovery model for commissioning and treatment systems, with a focus on where recovery approaches sit and what they can offer in terms of added value to treatment approaches

Quality of life and better than well: a mixed method study of long-term (post five years) recovery and recovery capital

“…'Better than well' (Best & Lublam 2012, Valentine, 2011 and the findings here in this study support the importance of adopting a strengths based approach and raising the visibility of recovery and recovery communities in terms of the benefit they may bring in making recovery more visible and challenging social isolation and stigma. Further this adds to the discussion about recovery happening in the context of the community rather than the clinic (Best 2017).…”

“…The National Treatment Agency (drugs and alcohol) in the UK became part of Public Health England in 2013 and aims to provide local commissioners, including public health specialists, with information to support and share best practice in relation to services, treatment and recovery and emphasises a recovery-oriented approach (UK Drug Strategy 2010). The use of the term recovery in both policy and research literature reflects a shift in focus from the pathology of addiction to a focus on the internal and external assets required to initiate and sustain long-term recovery from alcohol and other drug problems (White & Cloud 2008, Best et al 2017.…”

Can Nordic alcohol and drug treatment benefit from a recovery perspective?

“…All these aspects make up the conceptual field and political background against which “recovery” shall stand out as a promise of new solutions. Best (2017) notes the variations in the translation of recovery from the US to the UK, and how Scotland implemented recovery in a different way than England. Even someone who is not an expert on the US or UK systems can conclude that the differences in criminalisation of drug use, in the dominance of AA philosophy, in the application of substitution treatment or in the use of New Public Management (NPM) are important explanatory factors behind these various translations.…”

“…“Recovery” could be added to this list of travelling treatment perspectives. As David Best shows in his stimulating text in this issue ( Best, 2017 ), “recovery” is a very broad and rather loosely defined concept – a fat word in the long list of words that can be found in the alcohol and drug policy field (cf. Edman, 2009 ).…”

Is it possible to recover from recovery?

“…This shift in treatment policy is thought by some to be the lead cause for the recent surge in overdose deaths and treatment dropout in the UK ( Middleton, McGrail, & Stringer, 2016 ). In his article in this issue, David Best presents some of the advantages and problems associated with the shift to a recovery-based treatment system, and argues for a broad concept of recovery that includes harm reduction and medical substitution treatment ( Best, 2017 ).…”