AA was a mandatory component
More on the AA Doesn’t Work story:
Wood was working as a registered nurse on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside when he was diagnosed with substance use disorder after a psychotic break in the fall of 2013.
His professional college was informed, along with his union and Vancouver Coastal Health, his employer at the time.
He was referred to a doctor specializing in addictions, who created a plan that Wood would need to follow if he wanted to return to work. AA was a mandatory component.
As an atheist, Wood suggested alternatives to the 12-step program, including secular support groups like SMART Recovery and LifeRing Secular Recovery, but his doctor rejected them, according to emails Wood provided to CBC News.
He also asked to see a new doctor but the union told him nope, it’s 12 steps or nothing.
The AA meetings didn’t help, Wood said, and he lost his job as well as his registration as a nurse when he stopped going.
Since then, he’s been fighting to get his job back while dealing with his addictions using a drug called naltrexone, which blocks the intoxicating effects of alcohol and opiates. He says he is healthy and no longer meets the criteria for substance use disorder.
Better living through chemistry, that’s what I say.
While many people say AA has been instrumental in their recovery from addiction, scientists have long questioned the overall effectiveness of the program, and say choice in treatment plans is key to recovery.
Wood’s complaint to the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal was bolstered by letters of support from scientists, doctors, psychotherapists, lawyers, the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, the B.C. Humanist Association, and the Centre for Inquiry Canada, an Ontario-based humanist charity.
Good.
In a previous life, I briefly worked for DuPont. Their slogan had been “Better things for better living …through chemistry.” Not long before I joined the company, they dropped the ” …through chemistry” part. Until I worked there, I had no idea of the origin of the “better living through chemistry” slogan that was popular on T-shirts during my high school and college years.
There’s a fundamental irony in this dependence on AA despite the evidence that it’s not effective. The definition of insanity often attributed to Einstein (because of course Einstein was an expert on mental health)–that it’s doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results–seems to have originated in that form (though the sentiment’s been around longer) in an AA meeting, and later repeated in a Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet.
So are we to conclude that those who insist on 12-step programs are insane?
Amazingly, the ‘AA doesn’t work’ trope is largely promoted by a clique of Xtian Fundies inside AA.
Some members with statistical know-how have reviewed the claims:
https://www.webcitation.org/5mA3r6hSn
JtD,
“members with statistical know-how” .. but no sense of scientific ethics or honesty, apparently.
That study performs the same trick AA proponents always pull: exclude from the data everyone who stops attending meetings, on the grounds that they must not have been “really trying.”
Guess what? I bet when GOOP surveys its readers, it finds that a very high percentage of those who are still putting jade eggs in their vaginas five years later report perceiving a benefit from it. Shockingly, people who try it and perceive no benefit have a tendency to not keep doing it — but they shouldn’t count in the results because they didn’t “really try” vaginal bejazzling. Amazing! Someone should alert Jen Gunter!
This is more of the usual AA tautologizing. “AA always works, because anyone who it didn’t work for didn’t really do it right.” Seriously, the fact that AA thinks it’s brag-worthy that only 50% of the people who are still showing up at meetings regularly are sober says a lot. I’m amazed that number isn’t higher. WTF are they attending for — the coffee? The 13th-stepping?
Are 12 step meetings addictive?
So Joe Pesci is their higher power?
(George Carlin joke here’s a source)(yeah I know bad statistical math but shut up it’s funny!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPOfurmrjxo
Michael,
Yep, and in the paper JtD linked to, AA’s defenders claim that because half of those 50% will “someday” become sober, they count as successes, too, bringing them to a claimed 75% success rate for their thing-that-isn’t-a-treatment.
I don’t know whether or not I would go as far as Ophelia in saying that AA “does not work.” Part of the problem is that we’d have to define what constitutes “AA,” and this gets back to the problem I mentioned in the other thread about the slippery and varying nature of it. (Not coincidentally, it’s a little like defining “god.” When believers start playing the “but god is just ‘love'” game with you, you’ve reached the end of fruitful discussion.)
There are some basic elements associated with AA that I could imagine being helpful: a support network, and an outlet for socialization that doesn’t involve alcohol. But you don’t actually need AA for those thing, so they are not reasons to even prefer AA to other options, much less mandate it as the employer tried to do here.
I have known several people who went to AA, and I think for some people it is. They get a lot of attention there, people noticing them, and so forth, but also, they seem to believe that they will need this for the rest of their lives.
I have known people who quit without AA. They quit, they struggle, they hate quitting, but in the end, they stay quit. The people I’ve known who went to AA and used it to quit either: (1) keep going forever, often to the detriment of other relationships (seriously, a grandmother who wouldn’t go to her first grandchild’s first birthday party because it conflicted with her meeting? Get real. That isn’t health, that’s dependency) or (2) quit going, started drinking again, and started going back to AA because they hadn’t really quit, they had just put a hold on it while going to meetings.
When I started in therapy, the first thing my doctor did is establish what we needed to achieve for closure. AA doesn’t do closure. A guy I used to date (didn’t know he was alcoholic when we started dating; bad juju) was told he should break off his relationships – with his mother, with me, with everyone – because it was the people around him who made him drink. Seriously? I was the only woman he ever knew who treated him well. He preferred AA to being treated well by a woman he was dating. In the end, it was a relief when he broke it off, so I didn’t have to.
I am sure AA has some form of success for at least some people, but I suspect the success is fragile and precarious. If they quit going, they are at risk.
Shorter me: Yeah. Addictive.
I realized I left something out of the prior post. Obviously the question of AA’s effectiveness is a factual one, not one of my gut intuition. I skipped over a broader discussion of the evidence beyond the specific flawed piece linked by JtD. As I understand it, the evidence is fairly mixed, with some studies showing no benefit at all from AA, and some showing that it’s about as good as the current alternatives (which themselves may or may not be effective). But AA seems to fare best in studies that suffer from serious self-selection bias. And there’s no real idea of whether or not AA causes harm, which it might well do with some of its messaging about people being powerless, that anyone who gets sober without doing the steps is still a “dry drunk” who is “white-knuckling” it and poised for a relapse, and the insistence that complete abstinence is the only acceptable goal.
So my best interpretation of that mixed evidence is that the best you can say for AA is (1) there may be some aspects of AA that are helpful in terms of peer support and non-drinking social networks; and (2) there may be a “different strokes for different folks” thing going on where AA’s approach is helpful for some people, without it being universally applicable. Even those two things are in doubt, though.