lol aa now and forever. there may be no institution more dangerous.
The Harvard Mental Health Letter, from The Harvard Medical School, stated quite plainly:
On their own
There is a high rate of recovery among alcoholics and addicts, treated and untreated. According to one estimate, heroin addicts break the habit in an average of 11 years. Another estimate is that at least 50% of alcoholics eventually free themselves although only 10% are ever treated. One recent study found that 80% of all alcoholics who recover for a year or more do so on their own, some after being unsuccessfully treated. When a group of these self-treated alcoholics was interviewed, 57% said they simply decided that alcohol was bad for them. Twenty-nine percent said health problems, frightening experiences, accidents, or blackouts persuaded them to quit. Others used such phrases as "Things were building up" or "I was sick and tired of it." Support from a husband or wife was important in sustaining the resolution.
Treatment of Drug Abuse and Addiction — Part III, The Harvard Mental Health Letter, Volume 12, Number 4, October 1995, page 3.
Quote:
In spite of the scarcity of good, properly run randomized longitudinal controlled studies of the effectiveness of Alcoholics Anonymous, there are still several good tests and studies which were done properly, and give us a good idea of what is happening.
There is experimental evidence that the A.A. doctrine of powerlessness leads to binge drinking. In a sophisticated controlled study of A.A.'s effectiveness (Brandsma et. al.), court-mandated offenders who had been sent to Alcoholics Anonymous for several months were engaging in FIVE TIMES as much binge drinking as another group of alcoholics who got no treatment at all, and the A.A. group was doing NINE TIMES as much binge drinking as another group of alcoholics who got rational behavior therapy.
Those results are almost unbelievable, but are easy to understand — when you are drunk, it's easy to rationalize drinking some more by saying,
"Oh well, A.A. says that I'm powerless over alcohol. I can't control it, so there is no sense in trying. I'm doomed, because I already took a drink. One drink, one drunk. I'm screwed, because I already lost all of my sober time, and I have to give back all of my sobriety coins. Might as well just relax and enjoy it now. Pass that bottle over here, buddy."
It's also easy to rationalize taking the first drink with,
"I'm powerless. I can't help it. The Big Book says that I have no defense against those strange mental blank spots when I'll drink again. Bottoms up!"
"...there is a paucity of scientific studies supporting the superior effectiveness of AA."
Reid K. Hester and William R. Miller (eds.)
Handbook of Alcoholism Treatment Approaches: Effective Alternatives. New York: Pergamon (1989), page 165.
...AA research has been mostly pre-experimental in design, has failed to use instrumentation of established reliability, has usually not attempted to check for the validity of the self report data obtained, has inadequately assessed the nature of subjects' alcohol problems, has been deficient in describing demographic characteristics of the sample and has sampled an unrepresentatively large number of middle-aged people and an unrepresentatively small number of women...
Emrick, Tonigan, Montgomery, Little (1993)
"It has often been alleged, but the allegations never substantiated experimentally, that behavior and conditioning therapies represent purely symptomatic treatment and that such treatment is usually ineffective in the long run."
Cyril M. Franks, Ph.D.
in Alcoholism: Its Scope, Cause, and Treatment, Dr. Ruth Fox, ed. (1955), page 189.
A recent review by the Cochrane Library, a health-care research group, of studies on alcohol treatment conducted between 1966 and 2005 states its results plainly:
"No experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA or TSF [12-step facilitation] approaches for reducing alcohol dependence or problems."
We're addicted to rehab. It doesn't even work., By Bankole A. Johnson, The Washington Post, Sunday, August 8, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...080602660.html
Dr. and Prof. Bankole A. Johnson currently serves as Alumni Professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia. Look here.