Enabling or Engaging? The Role of Recovery Support Services in Addiction Recovery

Abstract

Recovery capital—the quantity and quality of internal and external resources to initiate and maintain recovery—is explored with suggestions for how recovery support services (RSS) (nontraditional, and often nonprofessional support) can be utilized within a context of comprehensive addiction services. This article includes a brief history of RSS, conceptual and operational definitions of RSS, a framework for evaluating RSS, along with a review of recent empirical evidence that suggests that rather than enabling continued addiction, recovery supports are effective at engaging people into care, especially those who have little recovery capital, and/or who otherwise would likely have little to no “access to recovery.”

KEYWORDS:

• Recovery support services
• recovery capital
• peer support
• access to recovery

Notes

This research was supported, in part, by Grant #DA13856 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).

¹See special issue of Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment Volume 15, Number 1, 1998.