1An Addiction Recovery Glossary: The Languages of American Communities of Recovery1

Health and social problems are usually studied by examining their sources, patterns and consequences. The rationale for this approach is that understanding such factors will lead to effective prevention and intervention strategies. While this approach has led to remarkable breakthroughs in certain areas of medicine (e.g., infectious disease), the promises of similarly striking breakthroughs in understanding and treating historically intractable problems like addiction remain unfulfilled. Since Benjamin Rush’s 1784 treatise on chronic intoxication, generations of addictionologists have authored texts and articles about the pathology of addiction. Studying addictive drugs and why people use them, generating speculative essays on why some people can’t stop using them, and describing and evaluating countless efforts to punish or treat those with alcohol and other drug problems are all part of the multi-billion dollar, problem-focused addiction industry. There is another approach–one that focuses not on the sources of addiction, but on the successful solutions that already exist in the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals, families and communities. These solutions are of two types: people with great access to alcohol and other drugs who do not use such substances or who use but do not develop alcohol- or other drug-related (AOD) problems, and people who have achieved a sustained resolution of AOD problems across a wide spectrum of problem severity. This second approach assumes that the study of resiliency and recovery may hold the key to more effective strategies for preventing and managing AOD problems–strategies quite different than those flowing from the pathology perspective. Two fledgling movements are adding momentum to this shift from a pathology paradigm 1This is an amplification of a glossary created for the Behavioral Health Recovery Management project, a partnership of Fayette Companies of Peoria, IL and Chestnut Healt