Community Rehab

Over the past 10-15 years there has been massive disinvestments in Tier 4 services, essentially residential rehab of the historical type; large houses in the countryside where people come from all over the country.

Unfortunately, whereas people would often do very well during the rehab episode, there were too many instances of relapse once the person returned to their own community. Research also pointed out that many of those who did succeed, remained in the locality of the rehab centre, which in effect meant that local authorities were exporting their successes. Gradually, it has become increasingly clear that if a person with a serious drug addiction was going to succeed, there would need to be a very real focus on that person’s social, cultural and economic needs in the community in which they were going to recover. Organisations operating from remote sites are an essential component of a well-balanced treatment system, but they are not well placed to forge the necessary links and relationships with providers of critical wrap around services within the many communities to which many of their clients would eventually need to return. The physiological hurdles of addiction are brief and easy to overcome compared to those that a person will face on the much longer journey to come, in the community, where much work is often needed around family issues, housing, education, training and employment. Being at the heart of a person’s own community, Park View Project is ideally placed to begin the process of reintegration by addressing these needs at a very early stage of a person’s recovery journey.

There is also a great boon for the city or town in which a community rehab exists: they generate indigenous recovery communities, populated by individuals who can stand as testament that recovery is possible, that not only is there life after drink and drugs, but that it can be rich and meaningful. Towns and cities need robust cohorts of people who have recovered from addiction. There is a black hole within all big towns and cities, which promises an escape to the vulnerable and hopeless; a sense of identity, power, prestige and security to the dysfunctional; only to yield a life of crime, prisons, homelessness, sex work and despair. It is a powerful force, which attracts, but an indigenous recovery community has the same self generating energy which also attracts, for a wholly different purpose of course. An indigenous recovery community has a life force, a life of it’s own, and once it is alive and well it naturally breeds more of the same; it grows: recovery begets recovery!

Many people find recovery within these communities without incurring treatment costs, and thereafter cease to impose the criminal justice, health, housing and social security costs to the system, which many have done for years. In fact, it would not be at all surprising if the amount of money saved as a result of people not being admitted to hospital with drug and alcohol problems as a result of their engagement with Park View was at least equivalent to our annual service costs. This is besides all of the other costs mentioned above. Indeed, and the evidence is now clear and too loud to be ignored: tax-paying employment almost invariably follows recovery within 2 years; this is real added value! At Park View we are particularly proud of all of the ex-clients who are working in and around Liverpool in the drug and alcohol field.

If our drug and alcohol treatment system is going to make any real impact at all on the misery caused by addiction, it is crucial that there is a visible and robust recovery community which can support the recovering addict and demonstrate by example what to him or her appears impossible: freedom from addiction. Clearly, we need to be grateful in Liverpool for the work that so many dedicated professionals in the drug and alcohol field do on a daily basis, but more often than not, professionals have not got the experience that somebody in long term recovery has got; they have not themselves taken the long road out of hell and it is these people who are in the unique position to connect with the still suffering addict in a way that nobody else can. It is our belief that the experience of the person in long term recovery, their story, of how they got clean and how they stay clean, needs to become an integral part of the drug treatment narrative.