bill white — Page 2 — Recovery Stories

‘Personal Reflections on Recovery Month 2014’ by Bill White

September 8, 2014

This month marks the 25th year of what has evolved into National Recovery Month. With an early focus on the slogan “Treatment Works,” the event took on its recovery focus in 1998 just as new and renewed grassroots recovery community organizations (RCOs) were rising across the U.S.

RCO representatives came together at the 2001 Recovery Summit in St Paul, MN to launch the formal organization of a new recovery advocacy movement under the leadership of Faces and Voices of Recovery.

In the intervening years, Recovery Month celebration events have grown beyond what anyone could have predicted. Local recovery celebration events that once welcomed a few dozen brave participants grew into the hundreds and then into the thousands.

This month, in community after community, recovering people and their families and allies will fill parks and streets as far as the eyes can see – an ocean of lives touched and transformed by recovery. More than 450 recovery celebration events are scheduled this month in the U.S. and such events will also transpire around the world – from Vancouver to Cape Town, from Tokyo to London.

‘Recovery in an Age of Cynicism’ by Bill White

August 21, 2014

‘There’s something happening here
But what it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s battle lines being drawn
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong”
For What It’s Worth, Buffalo Springfield (1966)
Lyrics by Stephen Stills

Recovery in an age of cynicism requires seeking the less traveled path.

We live in a strange era. Pessimism seems to be seeping into every aspect of global culture – fed by leaders who divide rather than unite, who pander rather than educate and elevate, and who ply the politics of destruction to mask their own impotence to create.

Poisoned by such cynicism, we as a people act too often without thinking, speak too often without listening, and engage too often to confront and condemn rather than to communicate, until in our own loss of hope, we lapse into disillusioned detachment and silence – shrinking our world to a small circle we vow to protect.

‘From the Rooms to the Streets’ by Bill White

August 12, 2014

‘Until recently, recovery from addiction was shrouded in public secrecy in the United States and in most other countries. Addiction has long been viewed as a personally and culturally intractable problem, and pessimism has reigned about the prospects of long-term addiction recovery.

These perceptions have been fed by the unrelenting public visibility of addiction-related problems, but the comparable invisibility of stable, long-term addiction recovery.

Historically, most people in recovery either completely eschewed recovery status (refused the addiction and recovery labels and culturally “passed”) or regularly cloistered themselves in “the rooms” of recovery mutual aid meetings before repeatedly and invisibly re-entering their civilian roles without acknowledgement of their recovery status.

‘Recovery for a Higher Purpose’ by Bill White

July 31, 2014

“The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.” Michelangelo

It is one of the most beguiling qualities of the experience of addiction: it sucks up everything of importance in your life and casts those cherished assets into the remotest reaches of one’s heart, leaving nothing but itself. This all occurs an inch at a time and second by second – increments so small they escape the category of decisions.

It is at the end of such a process that one cluster of fears stands greater than the full awareness of what has been lost. That is the terror of one’s own emptiness and the gaping nothingness of one’s future. Those latter breakthroughs of consciousness can fuel unending cycles of oblivion and sickness and take damaged souls to, or beyond, the brink of suicide.

These same fears pose a significant obstacle to recovery initiation. That’s why the promise of recovery must offer more than the removal of alcohol and other drugs from one’s life. For the person staring into the abyss, the promise of recovery to a life of meaning and purpose may be far more potent than the promise of recovery from addiction.

‘Experiencing Recovery – Part 10′ by William L. White: Recovery Paradigm and Addiction Treatment

July 17, 2014

The last part of Bill White’s 2012 Norman E. Zinberg Memorial Lecture from Harvard. Bill says he is not a teacher of these issues about recovery, but still a student. He encourages us all to be students of this rapidly changing ecology of recovery in the US. Bill also looks at what we need to do in the future in relation to recovery and recovery-based care.

Category: Blog Tags: addiction, bill white, community, family, recovery capital, recovery management, support services, talk

‘Experiencing Recovery – Part 9′ by William L. White: Recovery Advocacy and New Recovery Support

July 16, 2014

Bill talks about recovery as a new paradigm and its influence on treatment systems. He goes on to describe the new recovery advocacy movement and new recovery institutions and organisations. Most of this is occurring at a grassroots level.

Category: Blog Tags: advocacy, bill white, community centres, grassroots, recovery, recovery management, support, treatment

‘Experiencing Recovery – Part 8′ by William L. White: History of Recovery Support

July 14, 2014

Bill introduces about the various types of recovery support that have existed historically: natural support, limited generalist support within the community, peer recovery (mutual aid) and treatment. He then goes on to describe how things have been changing in recent years.

Category: Blog Tags: bill white, identity, mutual aid, peer support, recovery, support, talk, treatment

‘Experiencing Recovery – Part 7′ by William L. White: Family Recovery

July 13, 2014

Bill briefly describes how many families fall apart during the early stages of recovery and points out that as a society we do very little about this. Stephanie Brown describes this effect on family as the trauma of recovery.

Category: Blog Tags: bill white, early recovery, family, recovery, scaffolding, stephanie brown, talk, trauma

‘Experiencing Recovery – Part 6′ by William L. White: Recovery Durability Set Point

July 10, 2014

When does recovery become durable? When does sobriety today predict sobriety for a lifetime? When does my risk of resuming alcohol and drug use and having a recurrence of a substance use disorder plummet?

Category: Blog Tags: addiction, bill white, cancer, check-up, durability, post-treatment monitoring, recovery, talk

‘Experiencing Recovery – Part 5′ by William L. White: Recovery Identity & Cultural Affiliation

July 9, 2014

This part of Bill’s excellent talk focuses on identity, social stigma and recovery styles. He describes how some people hide behind anonymity because they are ashamed of themselves.

Category: Blog Tags: affiliation, anonymity, bill white, culture, identity, recovery, stigma, story

‘Experiencing Recovery – Part 4′ by William L. White: Frameworks of Recovery

July 8, 2014

In this part of his talk, Bill White discusses the degrees/depths of recovery. He describes how some better people feel ‘better than well’ after recovery.

He goes on to describe different types of recovery initiation/maintenance framework and different styles of recovery.

Category: Blog Tags: better than well, bill white, change, mutual aid, recovery, self, style, talk

‘Experiencing Recovery – Part 3′ by William L. White: Toward a Recovery Paradigm

July 7, 2014

More of Bill White’s talk that he gave at the Harvard Addiction Conference in 2012, the Norman E. Zinberg Memorial Lecture.

Bill talks about the disconnection between recovery and treatment, and asks what do we know about the science of recovery. And how do we define recovery? He tells us how little neuroscience has told us about recovery.

Category: Blog Tags: addiction, bill white, disconnection, neurobiology, recovery, remission, research, treatment

‘Experiencing Recovery – Part 2′ by William L. White: The Rise of Modern Addiction Treatment

July 6, 2014

I continue Bill White’s talk that he gave at the Harvard Addiction Conference in 2012, the Norman E. Zinberg Memorial Lecture. An amazing history of recovery and treatment for alcohol and drug addiction.

Category: Blog Tags: addiction, bill white, mental hospitals, mutual aid, recovery, therapeutic communities, treatment, USA

‘Experiencing Recovery – Part 1’ by William L. White: Early History of Recovery in the US

July 5, 2014

Last week, I highlighted the fact that a new edition of Bill White’s classic book Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America has just rolled off the presses. I can tell you that this is one of the best (and most fascinating) books that you will ever read.

To celebrate the ‘rolling of the presses’ and Bill’s remarkable career in the recovery field, I am going to show a talk Bill gave at the Harvard Addiction Conference in 2012, the Norman E. Zinberg Memorial Lecture. I will show one part a day for the next 10 days, taken from Bill’s excellent website.

In the first part, Bill describes shows just how far back recovery goes historically in the US – to Native American Indians in the 1730s!

Category: Blog Tags: bill white, history, inebriates, mutual aid, native american indians, recovery, treatment, USA

‘The Year of the Dragon’ by Bill White

July 1, 2014

If you are interested in this field, this is quite simply one of the best books you will ever read. Bill, thank you!

‘A new edition of Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America has just rolled off the presses. The first edition (1998) went through multiple printings and has been used as a text in collegiate addictions studies programs.

Of even greater import has been how this history helped many people in recovery see themselves as “a people” and contributed to the rise of a new recovery advocacy movement in the U.S..

It is ironic with all I have sought to do professionally within the addictions field that my most lasting contribution will likely come from my hobby – four decades of investigating the history of addiction treatment and recovery. It is thus fitting that one of my final acts of professional service will be releasing this new edition.

‘A Rendezvous With Hope’ by Bill White

June 2, 2014

‘Through my early tenure in the addictions field, the question of readiness for treatment and recovery was thought to be a pain quotient. We then believed that people didn’t enter recovery until they had “hit bottom.” If a person did not show evidence of such pain-induced readiness, they were often refused admission to treatment. Then we recognized that the reason it took people so long to “hit bottom” was that they were protected from the painful consequences of their alcohol and other drug use by people we called “enablers.” We then set about teaching enablers to stop rescuing and protecting their beloved but addicted family members.

Read More ➔

Category: Blog Tags: bill white, empower, hope, outreach, pain, Project SAFE, recovery, treatment

‘Spirituality and Recovery’ by Bill White

May 21, 2014

A new book, Experiencing Spirituality, co-authored by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham, has just been released. It will find a broad and appreciative audience and will be of particular interest to addiction professionals, recovery support specialists, and people in recovery.

It is not a treatise on how to recover, but it offers profound insights about how to live one’s life in recovery. Brilliantly conceived and beautifully written, Experiencing Spirituality is one of those rare books readers will return to again and again as a balm for old and fresh wounds and as a meditation on how to live a life of greater balance, fulfillment, and self-acceptance.

Kurtz is best known to readers of this site for his classic text, Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, Ketcham for her co-authorship of Under the Influence and Beyond the Influence.

In 1992, Kurtz and Ketcham co-authored The Spirituality of Imperfection, which used classic stories to explore the spiritual legacies of Alcoholics Anonymous. The Spirituality of Imperfection is one of my all-time favorite books.

‘Brain Surgery as Addiction Treatment?’ by Bill White

May 11, 2014

‘In 1935 – the founding year of Alcoholics Anonymous, Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz introduced a surgical procedure into psychiatry that came to be known as the prefrontal lobotomy (recall One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). Drs. Walter Freeman and James Watts pioneered the use of this technique in the United States in 1936.

By 1960, 100,000 psychosurgery procedures had been performed in the U.S. Patients targeted for this procedure included those judged to have “compulsive hedonias” – alcoholism, drug addiction, excessive eating and sexual deviations.

The prefrontal lobotomy procedure severed the connecting nerves between the thalamus and the prefrontal and frontal lobes of the brain. Its intent was to induce significant changes in thinking and personality that could alter the course of intractable psychiatric illness.

The total number of people with substance use disorders who underwent this procedure is unknown. One could assume that the prefrontal lobotomy is one more chapter of “harm in the name of help” long ago cast into the dustbin of addiction treatment history in the U.S., but when exactly did use of this procedure stop? The following story suggests it may have gone on much longer than once thought.

‘The Resilience of Alcoholics Anonymous’ by Bill White and Ernie Kurtz

May 7, 2014

Here is a seminal article describing what it takes to impact successfully on addiction and facilitate recovery. It helps us understand what underlies the success of AA.

‘Attacking Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) and 12-step oriented addiction treatment has become a specialized industry with its own genre of literature, celebrity authors and speakers, single-focus websites, and promoted alternatives. Collectively, these critics suggest that A.A. is an anachronism whose effectiveness has been exaggerated and whose time in the sun has passed.

A.A.’s institutional response to these criticisms has been a consistent pattern of private self-reflection (e.g., Bill Wilson’s “Our Critics can be Our Benefactors”) and public silence (e.g., no opinion on outside controversial issues, personal anonymity at level of press, and public relations based on attraction rather than promotion – as dictated by A.A.’s Traditions).

Read More ➔

Category: Blog Tags: AA, bill white, cultural, emowerment, framework, recovery, research, review

‘Stop kicking people out of addiction treatment’ by Bill White

April 7, 2014

‘In 2005, my colleagues Christy Scott, Michael Dennis, Michael Boyle and I co-authored an article entitled It’s Time to Stop Kicking People out of Addiction Treatment. The latest (2002) data then available confirmed that 18% (288,000) of all persons admitted to specialized addiction treatment in the U.S. were administratively discharged (“kicked out”) prior to treatment completion.

Those persons whose treatment was terminated in this manner were often those with the most severe and complex addictions and the least natural recovery support resources – in short, those most in need of professional treatment.

The most frequent cause for administrative discharge (AD) over the past half century has been continued use of alcohol or other drugs during treatment in spite of threatened consequences, e.g., the central symptom of the disorder.