By Martin Preston, CEO and Founder of Delamere
The first time I went into rehab, I was still a teenager. I completed the programme, left, and within five months I was drinking again.
That experience taught me something I have never forgotten: completing treatment is not the same as recovery.
I had started drinking at 14 because I liked the confidence it gave me.
By university, I was drinking vodka alone in my room and pretending to my family that everything was fine.
After that first visit to rehab, things became worse. Cocaine followed. I lost jobs, moved back in with my parents and became someone my family barely recognised.
When I returned to treatment at 21, I was ready in a way I had not been before. But recovery still did not happen simply because I reached the end of a programme.
I spent the next 18 months making it the focus of my life.
That raises a question the addiction treatment sector has ducked for too long: if finishing treatment is not the same as recovering, what exactly should count as success?
The reality is, someone can be abstinent, but that doesn’t tell you everything about their health, relationships, and mental state.
There is still no single agreed definition of recovery, and in the private addiction treatment sector in particular there is considerable freedom over which outcomes providers measure and how success is described.
Unlike publicly commissioned services, there is no single consistent framework through which private providers are required to demonstrate longer-term recovery outcomes. That leaves too much room for providers to make claims about success without meaningful independent scrutiny.
In effect, we can end up marking our own homework.
I want to see the standard raised across addiction treatment. If you say you help people recover, you should be prepared to show what you mean by recovery, what happens to people after they leave treatment and how you know your approach is working. And you should be prepared for someone independent to test those claims.
Delamere has to live by that standard too. That is why we have opened our own treatment model to independent academic examination through a first-of-its-kind study, Knowledge Transfer Partnership, with Manchester Metropolitan University.
The project has now completed its initial research phase and is moving into detailed analysis, bringing us a step closer to understanding what lasting recovery really looks like and how it should be measured.
I know first-hand what happens when treatment ends but recovery does not follow. If providers say their treatment works, they should be prepared to prove it.
For more information about Martin’s clinic visit https://delamere.com/
