Thank you, this is very valuable data and discussion.
They didn’t control for AA-only versus AA+Real-Treatment, studies which do almost never show improvement.
The problem with religion is it is ever-pervasive and its followers will do anything to justify it.
There is also a long-running problem with the followup interviews where calling and asking the patient is accepted as evidence, studies which look at longterm recidivism show a darker trend and even then you’re not grasping the full picture.
Of course, effective addiction recovery is very near to my heart, and I care about getting it right. I’d be curious to see which studies you’re pulling from that define AA in opposition to “Real Treatment”. Most treatments for alcohol addiction are rather hit-or-miss, and all the literature I’m familiar with generally find that combination therapies are more effective than any one therapy alone. Peer recovery groups are “a” therapy, AA is one of them, and they help some people, not all.
AA groups are as religious as their members; some of them are chill about it, many of them are insufferable about it, particularly in the southern US, and I suspect this is a big reason why people wash out of the program. Some of those washouts find their ways to more accepting groups or programs, some do not. I think the widespread attitude of “the program works if you work it” is a pretty grisly and self-satisfied example of survivorship bias, in AA and a lot of similar programs, propagated by people who found something that works for them and insisting that it’s the one true program that should work for everyone. This happens in religious and non-religious groups and it gives people the idea that if they can’t find help in that one group, that they must be broken beyond repair. I struggled with that for a long time before I found my people.
That’s a bit of a diversion, I don’t want to get into the gritty details of the many things I think are wrong with addiction recovery culture. Suffice to say that peer support groups can help, we haven’t really worked out all the problems with doing it well, and addiction is a hard problem. I think it’s worth taking the imperfect tools we have and trying to improve them, rather than throwing them out entirely because they are imperfect.
Thank you, this is very valuable data and discussion.
They didn’t control for AA-only versus AA+Real-Treatment, studies which do almost never show improvement.
The problem with religion is it is ever-pervasive and its followers will do anything to justify it.
There is also a long-running problem with the followup interviews where calling and asking the patient is accepted as evidence, studies which look at longterm recidivism show a darker trend and even then you’re not grasping the full picture.
Of course, effective addiction recovery is very near to my heart, and I care about getting it right. I’d be curious to see which studies you’re pulling from that define AA in opposition to “Real Treatment”. Most treatments for alcohol addiction are rather hit-or-miss, and all the literature I’m familiar with generally find that combination therapies are more effective than any one therapy alone. Peer recovery groups are “a” therapy, AA is one of them, and they help some people, not all.
AA groups are as religious as their members; some of them are chill about it, many of them are insufferable about it, particularly in the southern US, and I suspect this is a big reason why people wash out of the program. Some of those washouts find their ways to more accepting groups or programs, some do not. I think the widespread attitude of “the program works if you work it” is a pretty grisly and self-satisfied example of survivorship bias, in AA and a lot of similar programs, propagated by people who found something that works for them and insisting that it’s the one true program that should work for everyone. This happens in religious and non-religious groups and it gives people the idea that if they can’t find help in that one group, that they must be broken beyond repair. I struggled with that for a long time before I found my people.
That’s a bit of a diversion, I don’t want to get into the gritty details of the many things I think are wrong with addiction recovery culture. Suffice to say that peer support groups can help, we haven’t really worked out all the problems with doing it well, and addiction is a hard problem. I think it’s worth taking the imperfect tools we have and trying to improve them, rather than throwing them out entirely because they are imperfect.