TolhurstJ

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Hello, TolhurstJ, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:18, 4 September 2019 (UTC)

Hello!

Let me know if I can help out at all with the drug addiction recovery groups page. - Scarpy (talk) 18:13, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Scarpy I would love to hear your thoughts on sections to develop for this article. There are already pages on specific groups such as AA. I was going to potentially talk about the free literature available at meeting centers. I don't know what I could add that could come from peer reviewed academia. Any thoughts? TolhurstJ (talk) 06:35, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

@TolhurstJ: Maybe a section along the lines of "religiosity and referral effectiveness." The Further Reading section on that page is pretty good. It would be interesting to summarize data from articles like these two (there are probably newer ones since I hadn't reviewed the literature on the topic since 2008 if you wanted to look). If you read the 2004 article, you would think that there should be more emphasis on twelve-step alternatives, but the 1999 one would make you think it's less important.

Buddie, A. M. (2004). "Alternatives to Twelve-Step Programs". Journal of Forensic Psychology Practice. 4 (3): 61–70. doi:10.1300/J158v04n03_04.

Winzelberg, A.; Humphreys, K. (Oct 1999). "Should patients' religiosity influence clinicians' referral to 12-step self-help groups? Evidence from a study of 3,018 male substance abuse patients". Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. 67 (5): 790–794. doi:10.1037/0022-006X.67.5.790. PMID 10535246.

I've also thought it would be interesting to look into the factors that influence the growth, decline, and aggregation of various fellowships. I've suspected that organizations like Emotions Anonymous and Debtors Anonymous have existed for decades but never really took off mostly because there's not enough common experience among the members, so groups never really gel and never really grow. You might think addressing more general, common, problems -- like being in debt -- would appeal to more people, but my guess is it's actually the opposite. The groups that grow the most are the ones that are more specific. More specific groups mean members have more common experiences to bond over, so there's more group cohesion and more of a sense of belonging when going to meetings which means people are more likely to come back. I'll admit that it doesn't really explain why, for example, Crystal Meth Anonymous hasn't grown more -- my guess is that maybe it's too specific? So there's a "sweet spot" somewhere in between general enough to apply to many people, but specific enough to create a sense of belonging. Like the difference in life experiences between people who's drug of choice is legal (AA), and people who's drug of choice is illegal (NA) is big enough that two different fellowships make sense. But that there's nothing so different about using crystal meth from using other drugs that NA wouldn't provide an adequate sense of belonging... Probably too big of an idea to explore for a course that I'm sure is about to end in a few weeks, but one that's been on my mind for several years.

@Defendingaa: tagging you here to see if you have any ideas. TolhurstJ is working on the drug addiction recovery groups article for a college course. Any ideas on they could improve on it? - Scarpy (talk) 22:19, 22 November 2019 (UTC)

I don’t know if it’s still relevant, but here’s a good overview comparing various recovery groups: Zemore, Sarah E; Lui, Camillia; Mericle, Amy; Hemberg, Jordana; Kaskutas, Lee Ann (2018). "A longitudinal study of the comparative efficacy of Women for Sobriety, LifeRing, SMART Recovery, and 12-step groups for those with AUD". Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment. 88: 18–26. doi:10.1016/j.jsat.2018.02.004. PMC 5884451. PMID 29606223. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |lay-url= ignored (help) Summary: Roughly equally effective, as long as the goal for the patient is abstinence from alcohol. In terms of drug recovery, Fiorentine 1999 showed that NA and AA are both effective at reducing drug and alcohol abuse, but that study came out before the opioid crisis. I’m not sure how effective 12 step methodologies are with opioid abuse; I know there’s a huge controversy with Opioid replacement therapy, with NA having the explicit opinion that’s not a viable long-term treatment. Defendingaa (talk) 14:38, 23 December 2019 (UTC)