It is approaching a year since I left SMART Recovery here in the UK. The four years I spent with the organisation were some of the most exciting and rewarding of the 25+ years I have worked in the field of addictions and the thousands of people involved with the organisation achieved something very special. SMART Recovery is now a firmly established part of the recovery infrastructure in the UK, having gone from 40 weekly meetings to 500 meetings in just four years.
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In 2014 I carried out a detailed review of the evidence for addictions mutual aid, which you can download from that link. Proffessor John F. Kelly, PhD. and William White added supportive commentaries to the document and Proffessor Keith Humphreys blogged supportively about the paper as well.
###Extracts Mutual Aid is the process of giving and receiving non-clinical and non-professional help to achieve long-term recovery from addiction. Mutual Aid groups are composed of people who share the same problem, give and receive support as part of the group, are organised by members, value experiential knowledge and charge no fees.
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“Addiction recovery mutual aid organizations have a long and rich international history, but the rate of growth and diversification of philosophy and methods of these organizations in recent decades is without historical precedent. What is emerging is an ever-growing network of secular, spiritual, and religious recovery mutual aid groups adapted to diverse cultural, political,and religious contexts yet increasingly connected into a larger global community of recovery via the power of the Internet.
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