The dogma of AA has taken over
Book review: Inside Rehab: The Surprising Truth About Addiction Treatment and How to Get Help That Works by Anne M. Fletcher, Viking, 429 pp., $27.95
Why Rehab Fails
BY SACHA Z. SCOBLIC
The New Republic
My favorite two sentences in the Alcoholics Anonymous literature are: “Alcoholics Anonymous does not demand that you believe anything. All of its twelve steps are but suggestions.” When a drunk at the end of his tether, Bill Wilson, founded Alcoholics Anonymous in the late 1930s—a spiritual program based on meeting with other addicts—there was a fundamental humility to his ideology: It might work for some.
But that sentiment is often forgotten in the rooms of AA itself, where I spent a lot of time getting sober. There I found that what are suggestions to some are fundamentalist Scripture to others. In the rooms of AA, suggestions and traditions can sometimes feel more like ironclad laws, and when I inadvertently trespassed upon those laws, I was humiliated and rebuked. The predominantly AA-based culture of rehab in America has become one of imposition and tautology: If the program doesn’t work for you, then you didn’t work the program. If you succeed in staying sober, then you did a good job working the program; ergo, the program works.
In the rooms of AA, suggestions and traditions can sometimes feel more like ironclad laws.
In Anne M. Fletcher’s excellent and exhaustive book, she finds that almost all rehabs adhere to this intransigent dogma. Some just have better views, higher thread counts, and more horses (you know, for equine therapy). There is no individualized treatment. You check in, detox, and then go to addiction-education lectures, group therapy, and AA twelve-step meetings. “I often found myself wondering, ‘Where’s the counseling?’” writes Fletcher. Patients attend these group gatherings for 28 to 90 days, and are then released back into the real world. Problem is, the real world is teeming with temptations, and most people relapse. So what do we do with them? More rehab! Because it isn’t the rehab that has failed; it is you. Fletcher’s multi-year-long dive into the realities of rehabs is deeply unsettling. “Once you’ve seen any substance abuse program, you have seen the great majority of them,” Tom McClellan, co-founder of the Treatment Research Institute, tells Fletcher.
(Continued here.)
Why Rehab Fails
BY SACHA Z. SCOBLIC
The New Republic
My favorite two sentences in the Alcoholics Anonymous literature are: “Alcoholics Anonymous does not demand that you believe anything. All of its twelve steps are but suggestions.” When a drunk at the end of his tether, Bill Wilson, founded Alcoholics Anonymous in the late 1930s—a spiritual program based on meeting with other addicts—there was a fundamental humility to his ideology: It might work for some.
But that sentiment is often forgotten in the rooms of AA itself, where I spent a lot of time getting sober. There I found that what are suggestions to some are fundamentalist Scripture to others. In the rooms of AA, suggestions and traditions can sometimes feel more like ironclad laws, and when I inadvertently trespassed upon those laws, I was humiliated and rebuked. The predominantly AA-based culture of rehab in America has become one of imposition and tautology: If the program doesn’t work for you, then you didn’t work the program. If you succeed in staying sober, then you did a good job working the program; ergo, the program works.
In the rooms of AA, suggestions and traditions can sometimes feel more like ironclad laws.
In Anne M. Fletcher’s excellent and exhaustive book, she finds that almost all rehabs adhere to this intransigent dogma. Some just have better views, higher thread counts, and more horses (you know, for equine therapy). There is no individualized treatment. You check in, detox, and then go to addiction-education lectures, group therapy, and AA twelve-step meetings. “I often found myself wondering, ‘Where’s the counseling?’” writes Fletcher. Patients attend these group gatherings for 28 to 90 days, and are then released back into the real world. Problem is, the real world is teeming with temptations, and most people relapse. So what do we do with them? More rehab! Because it isn’t the rehab that has failed; it is you. Fletcher’s multi-year-long dive into the realities of rehabs is deeply unsettling. “Once you’ve seen any substance abuse program, you have seen the great majority of them,” Tom McClellan, co-founder of the Treatment Research Institute, tells Fletcher.
(Continued here.)
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