Guest blog by Mark Gilman, former Strategic Lead for NHS England on Substance Abuse
The UK is an ‘Abstinent Hostile Environment’. We are encouraged to consume. Alcohol is arguably the UK’s most dangerous drug but is promoted everywhere. Public drunkenness shocks visitors to the UK. Town centres are turned into war zones every Friday and Saturday night as drunken people fight over cabs and kebabs. Saturday and Sunday mornings dawn and daylight shines on pavements decorated with pools of vomit. Marathon drinking is often fuelled by cocaine powder and house music enthusiasts dance to MDMA.
Students begin three of four years at University with ‘Fresher’s Week’ which is an invitation to engage in cut price drinking to oblivion. The pungent smell of high octane cannabis products is as familiar as the odour of fast food.
Put all this together and we have abstinent hostile environments within which it is very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve and sustain abstinence based recovery.
University based recovery communities
A similar situation in the USA has contributed to the creation of college (university) based recovery communities. These are referred to as ‘Collegiate Recovery Communities’. A recent conference at Teesside University in Middlesbrough in June 2017 heard from Dr Thomas G. Kimball about the recovery college at Texas Tech University and their four core values:
- Clean, Sober, & Healthy Living
- Connected in Community
- Commitment to Academic Excellence
- Civility in Relationships
The conference added focus to the momentum for the development of Collegiate Recovery in the UK. Mark Gilman, Managing Director of Discovering Health Limited, spoke about recovery in the UK and highlighted some of the key cultural differences between recovery in the UK and the USA.
The biggest difference is the number of 12 step fellowship meetings in every community in the USA. The UK would need to see at least a ten-fold increase in 12 step fellowship meetings to be comparable to the USA. Another key difference is the secular nature of UK society and the cynicism that extends from this to the 12 step fellowship’s references to God and spirituality.
The way forward for Collegiate Recovery in the UK might be to ally itself to Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) which recognises people in recovery as assets and provides an established developmental framework for this initiative. The first British University to establish Collegiate Recovery will be pioneers in the development of recovery friendly environments for young people who want to go into Further and Higher Education to live and learn, not to drink and drug.
For more information on Collegiate Recovery contact Mark Gilman at markgilman2@gmail.com