Recovery from addiction can mean different things to different people. A recent publication by HRI Research and Evaluation Scientist, Dr. Jean Costello, highlights the importance of incorporating insights from people with lived experience when building systems for measuring treatment success.
How to Measure Addiction Recovery? Incorporating Perspectives of Individuals with Lived Experience was published in the June 2018 edition of the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction. Co-authored by Senior Research Associates, Courtney Ropp and Sarah Sousa, and HRI Senior Scientist, Dr. Brian Rush, the article outlines a study conducted between December 2014 and March 2015. Study participants were recruited from the Addiction Medicine Service Aftercare/Relapse-Prevention Program at Homewood Health Centre.
Through a series of focus groups and interviews, researchers identified four major themes related to how participants perceived recovery:
- Recovery is a process.
- Abstinence is an important aspect of recovery, but not sufficient.
- Recovery is multidimensional.
- Recovery requires ongoing commitment.
The authors conclude that recognizing recovery as a life-long process reinforces the need to measure and monitor outcomes well after treatment is completed. Further, input from individuals with lived experience helped to identify a number of important indicators of recovery that should be measured as part of a comprehensive outcome-monitoring system.
This study promotes the concept of human-centred design, which incorporates insights from end users during the development of a product or service. In this instance, patients are helping to shape research that will be meaningful to others experiencing addiction.