I left Ash Whitney’s house in Cilfrew, and headed to Gower (a peninsula just west of Swansea) where I had rented a house in Llangennith for my two boys (Ben and Sam) and myself for four nights. Llangennith is a village on the west coast of Gower which is close to Rhossili Beach, a beautiful surfing beach. I spent my first year renting a house in the village when I took up a position in the Psychology Department at the University of Wales, Swansea in 1992. I ended up living on Gower for 14 years and had such a great time there. I consider Gower to be my spiritual home.
I had closed down my neuroscience laboratory in the university in 2000 because I did not feel that a medical approach and the use of drugs were the answer to helping people overcome drug addiction. I realised that I needed to learn more about the nature of addiction and how it could be overcome by visiting treatment services and talking to practitioners and people trying to overcome addiction.
After leaving 
After visiting my eldest daughter Annalie and family in Manchester, and seeing recovery advocates 
I’ve just been reading another 
Whilst in the UK, I bought a hardback copy of Gabor Maté’s thought-provoking new book The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture. Yes, today’s Western society capitalist culture is toxic, according to one of the world’s leading trauma experts.
Last month, I returned from a European trip of just under eight weeks, a trip during which I visited a number of friends who work in the addiction recovery field. In a 
A couple of months ago I came across an excellent article in the 
My apologies that I have not posted on my blog for some time now. I was in Europe (UK, Sweden and Italy) for nearly eight weeks visiting family and friends. I hadn’t been back to the UK in two and half years, due to the fact that we were ‘locked down’ (our borders were closed) in Western Australia due to Covid. I came back
When I worked in the addiction recovery field in the UK running Wired In, I was a strong advocate of harm reduction services, including medication-assisted treatment. However, I spoke out against a treatment system that locked people into a methadone maintenance programme that provided no other therapeutic options, and no opportunity for abstinence-based treatment if people wanted to move on from daily use of methadone. Many people on methadone maintenance programmes were not even made aware of other treatment options.
Last year, I was interviewed by Huseyin Djemil of 
Another really except blog post on 
In an earlier series of blog posts starting 
I recently found this very interesting and important piece of research from 2012, 
On May 13, William (Bill) L White posted the following 
Whilst looking through my collection of ‘voices of recovery’ to see what might be appropriate for the book on recovery I’m writing, I came across this Recovery Stories blog post from September 2013. This is the first of a series of posts that Rosie first wrote on our online Wired In To Recovery community website which ran from 2008-12.
Here is the Conclusion to Julian Buchanan’s 
In my last blog post, I introduced a 
Yesterday, I was going through old Recovery Stories blogs (from the period 2013/4) when I came across this gem. It’s a guest blog by a GP who gives a personal view on professional perspectives of mutual aid. No doubt, it is just as relevant today as it was then.
