Conceptualizing Recovery Capital: Expansion of a Theoretical Construct

Abstract

In order to capture key personal and social resources individuals are able to access in their efforts to overcome substance misuse, we introduced the construct of recovery capital into the literature. The purpose of this paper is to further explore the construct and include discussions of implications unexplored in our previous writings. In this paper we reveal the relationship between access to large amounts of recovery capital and substance misuse maintenance and introduce the concept of negative recovery capital. In doing so, we examine the relationships between negative recovery capital and gender, age, health, mental health, and incarceration.

Keywords:

• recovery capital
• substance misuse recovery
• substance abuse recovery
• drug dependency recovery
• addiction recovery

Notes

¹ The journal's style utilizes the category substance abuse as a diagnostic category. Substances are used or misused; living organisms are and can be abused. Similarly, substance abuse, use, misuse are not being treated; the person is. Editor's note.

² The concept protective factors (as well as risk factors) are often noted in the literature, without adequately delineating theirdimensions (linear, nonlinear), their “demands”, the critical necessary conditions which are necessary for this posited factor-process to operate (begin, continue, become anchored and integrate, change as de facto realities change, cease, etc.) or not to and whether its underpinnings are theory-driven, empirically-based, individual and/or systemic stake-holder bound, based upon “principles of faith” or what. What is necessary—endogenously as well as exogenously for this process as well as outcome to happen? This is necessary to clarify if the term is not to remain as yet another shibboleth in a field of many stereotypes. Editor's note.

³ The reader is reminded that mystifying and empowering a “homogenized” (“drugs”) pharmacologically active chemical substance which effects the structure and/or functioning of a living organism, notwithstanding its legal or illegal status and its “socially” normed or deviant status, diminishes needed clarity in an area in which theory-driven, evidence-based generalizability and stakeholder-based principles of faith are all too often not sufficiently distinguishable. Editor's note.