New Addiction-Recovery Support Institutions: Mobilizing Support Beyond Professional Addiction Treatment and Recovery Mutual Aid

Abstract

For more than 150 years, support for the personal resolution of severe and persistent alcohol and other drug problems in the United States has been provided through three mechanisms: family, kinship, and informal social networks; peer-based recovery mutual-aid societies; and professionally directed addiction treatment. This article: (1) briefly reviews the history of these traditional recovery supports, (2) describes the recent emergence of new recovery support institutions and a distinctive, all-inclusive culture of recovery, and (3) discusses the implications of these recent developments for the future of addiction treatment and recovery in the United States.

KEYWORDS:

• recovery mutual aid
• recovery community organizations
• recovery advocacy movement
• recovery homes
• recovery industries
• recovery schools
• recovery ministries
• culture of recovery

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Pat Taylor of Faces and Voices of Recovery for her assistance in identifying resources identified in Table 2. This article was prepared as a briefing paper for the 2012 Betty Ford Institute/UCLA Annual Conference on Recovery.

Notes

1. All historical events and trends not otherwise cited are abstracted from White (1998)