Cleveland / Harris / Wiebe Substance Abuse Recovery in College

Community Supported Abstinence
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4419-1767-6
Verlag: Springer US
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 296 Seiten, eBook

Reihe: Advancing Responsible Adolescent Development

Substance Abuse Recovery in College explains in authoritative detail what collegiate recovery communities are, the types of services they provide, and their role in the context of campus life, with extended examples from Texas Tech University’s influential CSAR (Center for the Study of Addiction and Recovery) program. Using data from both conventional surveys and end-of-day daily Palm Pilot assessments as well as focus groups, the book examines community members’ experiences. In addition, the importance of a positive relationship between the recovery community and the school administration is emphasized.

Topics covered include:

The growing need for recovery services at colleges.

How recovery communities support abstinence and relapse prevention.

Who are community members and their addiction and treatment histories.

Daily lives of young adults in a collegiate recovery community.

Challenges and opportunities in establishing recovery communities on campus.

Building abstinence support into an academic curriculum.

This volume offers clear insights and up-close perspectives of importance to developmental and clinical child psychologists, social workers, higher education policymakers, and related professionals in human development, family studies, student services, college health care, and community services.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cleveland, H. Harrington

Harris, Kitty S.

Wiebe, Richard P.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

The Need for College Recovery Services.- Collegiate Recovery Communities: What They Are and How They Support Recovery.- Facilitating Identity Development in Collegiate Recovery: An Eriksonian Perspective.- Characteristics of Collegiate Recovery Community Members.- Maintaining Abstinence in College: Temptations and Tactics.- Daily Lives of Young Adult Members of a Collegiate Recovery Community.- How Membership in the Collegiate Recovery Community Maximizes Social Support for Abstinence and Reduces Risk of Relapse.- Building Support for Recovery into an Academic Curriculum: Student Reflections on the Value of Staff Run Seminars.- Establishing College-Based Recovery Communities: Opportunities and Challenges Encountered.

Leseproben

"Chapter 5 Maintaining Abstinence in College: Temptations and Tactics (p. 57-58)

Richard P. Wiebe, H. Harrington Cleveland, and Lukas R. Dean

As the previous chapter notes, the Collegiate Recovery Community (CRC) at Texas Tech University maintains an impressive relapse rate of only 4.4% per semester, which means that more than 95% of the community members continue their successful recovery each semester. Although one of bedrock beliefs of the Center for Study of Addiction and Recovery is that young men and women who are part of the Collegiate Recovery Community that the center supports should be striving for a “recovery” that goes far beyond day-to-day sobriety, it is important to recognize that in the midst of building a higher level of recovery, members must sometimes draw upon various strategies, ranging from the psychological to the physical to make it through their day, and their hard-won states of sobriety have to be defended against temptations that differ from member to member.

The purpose of this chapter is to closely examine the strategies that they are using to maintain their sobriety and the situations that challenge this sobriety. In addition, we consider “where” members’ recoveries are in the context of a well-known framework of addictive change, the Prochaska and DiClemente (1982) “stages-of-change” model. Whereas Chapter 4 explained who the members of the CRC are in terms of basic demographics and members’ past addictive and treatment histories, this chapters tells the story of what members struggle with, the tools that they use for their struggles, and how they think of their struggles, as something in the past that they have to revisit from time to time or as a daily challenge that defines their present.

One of the theoretical underpinnings of recovery is the notion that it is not a task that once achieved can be taken for granted. Rather, it is an ongoing process. According to this perspective, adhered to most notably by AA and other 12-step programs, an individual is said to be “in recovery,” not “cured” or “recovered” (see Humphreys, 2004). Maintaining recovery is a day-to-day challenge, and recovering addicts use specific tactics to counter the urge to relapse, matching tactics to situations. For CRC members, recovery will continue to present challenges after college. Therefore, members must develop the ability to sustain their recoveries while not surrounded by the protective bubble of the CRC. Thus, it is important not only to understand which aspects of their daily lives present the greatest threats to abstinence and recovery, but to examine the defenses they have developed to deal with these threats.

In creating their defenses, CRC members are to a great extent self-directed. In this way, they differ from patients or clients of an orthodox treatment program, in which specific treatment protocols must be followed. Instead of obediently obeying doctors’ orders, CRC members craft their recovery using elements derived from four main sources: abstinence-specific social support from peers and others; “selfhelp” groups such as AA and NA; clinical and other professionals such as CSAR staff; and intrapersonal will and action.

In this way, recovery may differ essentially from clinical intervention or treatment, in that an intervention might be said to have succeeded or failed, while recovery never ends. Alternatively, recovery might map easily onto treatment, in that each is a process through which individuals progress in stages. Under this view, CRC members, who have been in recovery before entering college and who exhibit low relapse rates, should be at an advanced stage of change."

Über Autor(innen)

H. Harrington Cleveland received his J.D. at Boston College in 1991 and his Ph.D. in Family Studies and Human Development from the University of Arizona in 1998. Following his Ph.D., he spent 2 years as a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. While at the University of North Carolina, he worked exclusively on analyzing data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health under the supervision of J. R. Udry. He has published extensively on the influences of genes and environments on both risk behaviors, such as alcohol and drug use, and the social experiences, such as associating with substance using peers, which can encourage these risk behaviors. The last few years, Dr. Cleveland has worked extensively with a community of college students in long-term recovery to understand how they construct their lives of abstinence.

Kitty Harris, Ph.D., is the Director of the Center for the Study of Addiction & Recovery at Texas Tech University. She is also Co-Director of the Texas Tech University Center for Child and Adolescent Development and Resiliency. Dr. Harris received her Master’s Degree in Speech Communication from University of North Texas in 1974 and her Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies from Texas Tech University in 1983. Dr. Harris currently holds LCDC and LMFT licenses. She has been on the faculty of Texas Tech University since 1988. In addition, she serves as the Program Director for Supportive Adolescent Services and Pre-Adolescent Supportive Services, a mentoring program in the Lubbock Independent School District designed to help teens with their everyday lives.
As Director of the Center for the Study of Addiction and Recovery, Dr. Harris coordinates two federal grants. One grant is a federal earmark in its second year of funding to replicate the Collegiate Recovery Community atuniversities nationwide. As a nationally recognized expert in recovery and recovery support, Dr. Harris was a member of the 2005 National Summit on Recovery sponsored by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and Center for Substance Abuse Treatment.