Search results

I am proud to be known as an expert by experience in recovery from mental distress, but I am also a co‐founder and director of a multi‐award winning, peer‐led charity called Changes 12 Steps to Mental Health. In the 1980s, after experiencing my third breakdown, I was an extremely angry person because of the lack of cross‐sector service provision to assist me in becoming whole again. Thankfully I used my rage to develop, along with my co‐founder Dave Wheat, our Changes 12 Steps to Mental Health services to meet the needs of those in mental distress. Changes 12 Steps to Mental Health provides person‐focused, recovery‐rooted services that aim to promote recovery, enabling people to become contributing members of society again. This is the history of Changes 12 Steps to Mental Health, our achievements and the challenges that we have faced in developing the services that we provide today.

Using strikingly different managerial techniques from conventional organizations, 12 Step Fellowships, most prominently Alcoholics Anonymous, provide useful clues to producing more effective, functional and humane organizations in contrast with our many dysfunctional firms which abuse their employees, behave unethically towards their customers, damage their social and ecological habitat and find it difficult to complete in a turbulent global environment. The founding Fellowship, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), extends to 131 countries with 1,550,000 members while the second largest, Al‐Anon/Alateen, has 414,000 members in 84 countries. Without advertising, government support or experts, AA is widely considered the most effective method for treating alcoholism. This success story was produced by members who, prior to AA, were themselves severely dysfunctional and often unemployable. Examines facets of the Fellowships (organizational structure, culture, communication and problem solving techniques) to demonstrate a powerful, little studied model for organizational learning and transformation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate research in the field of addictions utilising CBT and 12 step fellowship methods and to create an evidence base for an integrated treatment method utilising both approaches.

Research on CBT and 12 step fellowships and their current applications in addiction treatment are presented. Models of severe mental illness are referenced and the use of directive and guided referrals are used as a basis to build the paper's hypothesis. A mode of action how the treatments may work together is presented.

Findings indicate that guided treatment approaches for dual diagnosis are more likely to lead to long term therapeutic gains. Discussion involves the practical implications of this treatment and its ability to create a synergistic approach.

Implications include the potential for streamlined treatment approaches which have the potential to increase treatment adherence and outcomes. Implications, such as the joint use of social reinforcement techniques between 12 step fellowship approaches and CBT, are also discussed.

There is no previous research on the application of CBT and 12 step treatment modalities working together in a structured manner. Previous work has focussed primarily on severe mental illness. The current paper aims to provide an approach to treatment which utilises several modes of treatment to create more robust treatments for people suffering from dual diagnoses.

This article considers the role of mutual support on acute admissions wards. Building on the authors own experience of a 12‐step specialist inpatient programme Marion identifies some of the limitations of the approach and considers how some of the positive aspects might be modified and transferred to acute inpatient wards to help people with a dual diagnosis in this setting.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of the recommendation to replace identity-first language with person-first language on people who self-identify as recovering addicts as part of a recovery programme. Narcotics Anonymous (NA) will be used to illustrate the contextualised nature of the recovering addict identity.

To demonstrate the value of the recovering addict identity and social relations in NA, this paper draws on Axel Honneth’s theory of mutual recognition and self-formation.

Person-first language overlooks the significance of identity-first language to people in 12-step recovery. This oversight is linked to the logic of stigma reduction which excludes all identity-first language by association rather than assessing the impact of such terms on a case-by-case basis. Honneth’s theory is used to show how the recovering addict identity facilitates self-confidence and self-esteem through relations of mutual recognition in NA.

The argument excludes people who identify as recovering addicts, but do not attend 12-step groups. Further research would be needed to understand how the recommendation to use person-first language instead of identity-first language impacts upon other recovery communities and pathways.

The recommendation to replace identity-first language with person-first language might result in 12-step fellowships becoming marginalised within the broader academic and policy and practice arena. Language preferences can become a contentious issue when 12-step groups and their members enter the wider recovery arena where their preferred terminology is viewed as stigmatising and dehumanising.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first article to propose an alternative theoretical framework to stigma reduction for judging morally appropriate language in the alcohol and drugs field.

This article is supplied by Alison, a long‐time member of Dual Recovery Anonymous (DRA), about the aims and principles of their 12‐step programme. DRA's 12‐step programme helps members to recover from both a drug or alcohol dependency and emotional or psychiatric illness (dual diagnosis) by focusing on relapse prevention and actively improving the quality of their lives.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how clients – five years after completing treatment interventions endorsing abstinence – view abstinence and the role of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in their recovery process.

Interviews with 40 clients were conducted shortly after them finishing treatment and five years later. All the interviewees had attended treatment programmes based on the 12-step philosophy, and they all described abstinence as crucial to their recovery process in an initial interview.

At follow-up, the majority remained abstinent. For many, attending AA meetings was still important – some described attending as a routine, whereas others stressed that the meetings were crucial for remaining abstinent. For those who reported controlled drinking (CD), this was described either as a natural step in their recovery process or as associated with worries and self-doubts.

The results suggest the importance of offering interventions with various treatment goals and that clients choosing CD as part of their sustained recovery would benefit from support in this process, both from peers and professionals.

There are heterogeneous views on the possibilities of CD after recovery from substance use disorder both in research and in treatment systems. This study on client views on abstinence versus CD after treatment advocating total abstinence can contribute with perspectives on this ongoing discussion.

Just like human beings, some companies engage in recurrent bad behaviour that negatively impacts their stakeholders and their prospects for long-term survival. For example, some firms become caught up in a vortex of corruption. SNC-Lavalin, a large Canadian consulting engineering company, is an example of one organisation that embarked on this path. Since then, the company has taken numerous steps to overcome its persistent problems with corruption. The object of this study is to determine whether these steps can be compared to the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), which is recognised for helping individuals overcome addiction to alcohol and drugs.

To examine events at SNC-Lavalin between 2000 and 2022, the authors carry out an in-depth examination of internal and external documentation. Three sources of data are used: archival documents, news articles and corporate documentation.

The results of the analysis show that the AA 12-step program seems to correspond to the steps SNC-Lavalin has taken over time. The “organisational” version of this program that the authors have developed could be useful to advisers of companies that are struggling with other types of bad behaviour and wish to stamp it out. These bad behaviours include the exploitation of vulnerable manpower, the exploitation of consumers through planned obsolescence or aggressive sales practices and pollution in all its forms.

The study has certain limitations. It should be noted that the analyses were limited to public information. In addition, given the quantity of public information available for the period from 2009 to 2022, a methodical approach to selecting the sources of information elements was applied, which inevitably entailed ignoring other sources of information (e.g. television, radio and internet).

This study adds to previous work by providing an original and global perspective of the steps taken by a large international consulting engineering firm to overcome its recurring corruption problems. The parallel drawn with AA’s 12-step programs seems to correspond surprisingly well to the steps taken by the company. This parallel can potentially serve as a roadmap for advisers who have to counsel companies on recurring misconduct that has harmful repercussions for their stakeholders.

Enterprises are supportive of knowledge management (KM) activities if they result in “actionable information” that relates to achieving strategic and operational goals and improved performance. KM individuals and corporate practitioners have evolved multiple approaches to creating the discrete steps required to design, implement and measure knowledge management systems (KMS) that meet the “actionable information” expectation of organizations. However, there is no universally acclaimed standard or best practice readily embraced, the purpose of this article, therefore, is to investigate a process for a comprehensive KMS.

This article describes and analyzes five such approaches to an effective KMS; two are derived from academic sources and three from name recognizable practitioner corporations. The five use eight‐, nine‐ and ten‐step constructs for their KMSs.

The study found many similarities but were also able to project a 12‐step hybrid approach which combines all the best features of the five analyzed. Furthermore, the 12 steps are then logically distributed among the George Washington University “Four Pillar Framework” promulgated in 2000 and reflecting the four domains of leadership – organization – technology – learning which have consistently shown the capability to encompass all aspects of effective knowledge sharing and collaborative cultures. The 12‐step process is then put through a sensitivity/realism assessment using an actual configuration management application to demonstrate the utility of the process for future uses.

Ultimately, the various groupings and process steps described also lend themselves to the creation of an analysis and auditing instrument which can be applied to organizational environments to ascertain what exists and what is lacking for an effective KMS.

This article describes the significance of mutual aid and self‐help groups for employee assistance programmes (EAPs). In an era of dwindling resources, groups can be valuable adjunctive resources. Examples given are a recovery network of AA members at the workplace willing to act in a 12‐step fashion with EAP clients, a co‐dependency assessment and support group, a supervisor′s mutual aid support group and a peer support group diversity network. The benefit to EAP professionals of developing these groups is an expanded range of referral resources, increased visibility for the EAP and an opportunity to engage in community building within the workplace.