Supportive housing offers cost-effective response to homelessness and opioid use
Supportive housing offers cost-effective response to homelessness and opioid use
A new study shows that providing housing without requiring prior drug treatment produces major public health gains and cost savings.
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Any sort of public assistance for substance abuse here that includes housing comes with a laundry list of demands and restrictions, up to and including being locked up like you're in jail while claiming you can leave at any time (nice words, but when you say you want to leave, up come the roadblocks, stonewalling and gaslighting).
I have more agency and freedom roasting in my van than attempting any sort of help given how demeaning it is. As such, I've stopped bothering and am relying exclusively on networking through all possible channels to get out of this mess.
Narcotics/Alcoholic Anonymous groups are good networking options, aren't they?
Way too much Jesus for me. I was court-ordered to go to AA meetings after a 2005 DUI, and there is nothing in the world that makes me want to drink more than an AA meeting. It's a fucking cult.
Way too much Jesus for me.
As far as I can recall, AA was first established by two Jewish men.
That has no bearing on how meetings are conducted, though. Most are held in Protestant churches, and while AA claims to be agnostic, "Let go and let god" is shockingly frequent advice. The whole premise of the 12 Steps is that you can't get out the other end without finding religion.
Sure, they say "higher power" is individually defined, which looks great on paper. How it plays out is another story. Sponsors frequently insist on church attendance as a prerequisite for their assistance. AA plays a good game of pretending to be something it isn't, which is easy enough to believe if you've never seen what the organization actually encourages on the ground.
Then there's the effectiveness ... longitudinal studies have been all over the map on this for decades. AA itself and the for-profit treatment community that needs relapses to stay profitable cherry-pick the flattering ones (and from there, one needs to drill down to find out where funding for the study came from to ascertain bias), while those are far from the only ones.
Given the current state of web search, those float to the top (even on DDG -- I just did a search, and while one cited the 5%-12% success rate after a few years from a mid-aughts NIH study I remember, most cite somewhere on the order of 50%) while burying conflicting evidence.
It is straight out a cult. I was told by several people that the only way to stay sober was to go to a meeting at least once a day, seven days a week. So now you have a meeting addiction instead of an alcohol one and immerse yourself in the belief that one missed meeting will find you dead in a ditch. "Do as told or die" isn't a support network.
That's a shame that this meaningful organization, over time, turned out to be so useless.
Such is, sadly, the way of most things. AA was ahead of the curve in embracing enshittification.