Our new online recovery community

I've been very quiet recently on this blog because I have been working hard on the new web community we launched today. 

This blog will now close although we will keep all postings here. We have also moved all postings to my blog on the new site, but it has not been possible to move all the comments.

There will eventually be many blogs on our new online community. Please feel free to register, get your own profile page, and blog if you wish.

Please note that you will need to register to make comments on the new site's blogs. We ask that you read the Terms and Conditions of our online community. We will be trying to prevent and eradicate any offensive, abusive or troublesome behaviour on our community site.

Please take some time to look around the new site - it contains lots of interesting content. And help us empower people to tackle substance use problems.

Thanks for reading these google blogs - come over and enter our new world. 

Untangling treatment

For those of you who missed my last two Background Briefings in Drink and Drugs News, I have included the links below. After writing over 70 Briefings, I thought it was time that I reflected on what treatment involves (or should involve) and how it can help people along their path to recovery from addiction. 

In the first of this series, I described a large scale piece of qualitative research that Lucie James and I conducted on the views and experiences of clients on a high quality prison treatment programme. 

As psychologists, we were particularly interested in the key elements that were derived from the analysis: 'belonging', 'socialisation', 'learning' and 'support'. These themes impacted on a fifth theme, personal change, which comprised two components, motivation to change and self-esteem. 

In the second Briefing, I started to look more generally at the nature of treatment and how it helps recovery. I emphasised one of the most simple and important facts - recovery comes from within the person.  

I described some of the views of Arthur Bohart and Karen Tallman, as expressed in their seminal book, 'How Clients Make Therapy Work: The Process of Active Self-Healing'.

I took a brief look at what the client brings through the door when he or she comes for help from a treatment agency.

I hope you find these latest Briefings interesting. Let me know what you think.

The Wired In online recovery community

My apologies for not blogging recently but I have been deep into writing content and testing the new online community which is close to being launched. Kevin and my blogs have been moved over onto the new site so there will be a nice archive there.

A small community has developed amongst the people testing the site and we've had some amusing experiences. Here is one of my recent postings which generated a number of comments:

'Chris G and his 200,000 followers

We have been very busy developing the website and doing related things, so it is good to have a dose of humour now and again.

Chris G emailed Lucie just now to say that some words in blue had appeared on his profile page underneath his Friends list. He now had 200,000 followers! As he said to Lucie, ‘Come with me child and I will show you the world.’

Now, we know that strange things happen from time to time, because Nathan is working on the functionality and tests things periodically.

The only problem is that Chris G is really excited about having such an impact on the world – and what is this going to do to his self-esteem when he loses his followers in one foul sweep of Nathan’s programming!

Please can you all check out that he gets back on his feet after such a loss!!

And don’t stop blogging Chris, for they may return.'