Drug Treatment Graduation Ceremonies: It's Time to Put This Long-Cherished Tradition to Rest

Abstract

Over past decades, graduation ceremonies have become a prominent, long-standing, traditional centerpiece of substance use disorder treatment programs and settings. In total, graduations provide clients with a platform to look back at their time in treatment, consider the things they'll take away from that experience, and voice the particularities of their own personhood (“my addict personality” or “parts of the old me”) that they wish to symbolically bury and “leave behind.” As such, graduation ceremonies are celebratory in nature and socially reinforce milestones, accomplishments, and memories of clients' journeys in treatment recovery. However, lack of survey data on client and professional perceptions of graduation ceremonies, in combination with the virtually nonexistent body of evidence on how they affect the recovery process, raise provocative and potent questions about how this tradition has perpetuated itself throughout treatment practices. This article explores the place and orientation of graduation ceremonies as part of the therapeutic context of treatment and recovery. Challenging the apparent taboo against questioning such ceremonies permits new suggestions for how treatment staff and clients might proceed with graduation ceremonies in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Graduation ceremonies
• recovery management
• drug treatment
• substance abuse
• performance measures
• acute care
• commencement