Call 888-647-0579 to speak with an alcohol or drug abuse counselor.

Who Answers?

Professional ex-s´

I have found really interesting article in Journal of Contemporary Ethnography from 1991. The author, J. David Brown, is Assistant professor of sociology at Northern Illinois University who had struggled for 13 years with substance abuse problems, then he went to rehab and after then, he started to be a counselor himself. He uses the introspective methods and the qualitative interviews to describe the identity transformation of drug users into professionals – drug counselors. According to him, the identity of “professional ex” is formed even before the professional trainings – he calls this process “preprofessional socialization”. As he points out: “One of the most pervasive characteristics of preprofessional socialization is its ability to transform the stigmatized identities of substance abusers into identities that have adopted a calling to a professional counseling career” (p. 159).

He cites really amazing statistics in his article:

**72% of the people working in more than 10.000 treatment centers in U.S. has experienced substance abuse problems (according a research of Sobell and Sobell, 1988)
there was only 13% recidivism rate within ex-prisoner who were hired to work as a prison-counselors

**Also, he notes that all the ex-users he was interviewing were working in treatment programs that were based on 12-step approach and most of them evaluated the knowledge of disease concept of addiction as significant for being effective substance abuse counselor.

From my point of view, Brown describes quite special group of people who had transformed their “fixed” identity of drug addict (ill) into another “fixed” identity of drug counselor (professional ex). People who I was doing interviews with, have not created so “fixed” identities. Their identities seem to be more flexible, more fluent. But even within them there were two people who started to work as professionals after they stopped using drugs.

One of them, Milos, was a methamphetamine dealer and consumer for three years. Then, one day, he went with his friend to the “meth cook” place and he met his sister in law. She said: “why don´t you come to see your daughter?”
“Where is she?” he replied.
“In our place… Her mother left her here and went to Germany with her new friend.”
It was the turning point for him. He went to his sister in law place and when he met his daughter, she gave him a big hug starting to shoout: “Daddy, daddy!” He started to cry. He deleted all the friends´ phone numbers immediately and was for few weeks only with his daughter. Then, for two years, he worked in different positions doing mainly in constructions field but he all the time he was attracted by the drug issues somehow. So he applied for a job as an outreach worker in drop-in center. He was hired and after several weeks the number of clients increased from 30 to 120.

“…the people started to perceive me as one of them, I did not use any professional language, I used slang words, and they accepted me and started to bring their friends too. The worst feelings were when the people whom I used to hang around with and whom I used to sell drugs appeared there. But at the end, it helped. Like me, they also did not want to talk about the past, however, they were bringing other people bacause they knew me.”

“…so they can see on their own eyes that it is possible to stop. Also, we get lots of help from people who stopped using and they visit us from time to time. The others, who are still using, can see that they have good clothes, they are smoking good cigarettes, telling the stories as they were skiing in the mountains at the weekends and they are just impressed… they say… that guy was totally down and look, where he is now…”
__________
source: http://pavelwiredin.blogspot.com/

More Treatment & Detox Articles

On Russians' drinking habits

A SuperJob.ru survey says most Russians believe alcohol abuse is their most negative character trait(!). 22% of 1800 respondents believe it is so, while 20% claim Russians’ curse is their laziness. Boozing has become something of a national character trait in Russia. Although statistics shows that alcohol consumption has been annually reducing in Russia, stories….

Canadians spend millions drinking just to sleep

Canadians are spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year self-medicating their insomnia with alcohol, a new study suggests. “We were very surprised to see that so many people use alcohol as a way to promote sleep, particularly because it has more detrimental than beneficial effects on sleep,” says Charles Morin, a professor of psychology….

How Bulimia Treatment Improves Your Health

With weight loss or avoiding weight gain as the primary goal, bulimia drives many women (and a few men) to take drastic measures to attain an “ideal” body weight. According to Harvard Health Publications, an estimated one out of every 100 women will develop bulimia in their lifetime, whereas bulimia rates for men equal one-tenth….

Treating teens and adults for substance abuse

The number of teenagers and adults influenced under the substance abuse is greatly increasing worldwide. Substance abuse largely affects the physical and the mental state of a person. Substance abuse affects the body of an individual depending on various the factors like the age, gender, quantity of the drugs taken on regular basis etc. Therefore,….

Treatment Options for Veterans

Many veterans experience the ravages of war and combat first-hand. Most anyone put through these types of experiences carries some form of emotional and even psychological scarring. Couple this with the wide range of physical injuries that take place, and it is little wonder drug addiction affects so many veterans in one form or another…..