[QUOTE=David Simmons]
However, that belief is based on half-truth, anecdotes by individuals such as those who were sent to AA by a court. It might interest you to know that the great majority of AA members regard such conditions of probation as worse than useless. Someone who doesn’t want to be there is of no use to AA since the whole idea is voluntary membership. Of course not all AA members feel this way.
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Cite me an AA meeting that has refused to sign attendance slips or participate.
That’s a pretty ridiculous and, frankly, disingenuous argument. In what universe is “go do this or you go/stay in to jail” not forcing?
Thankfully, many courts have begun to rule against such programs: either there must be am equally available non-religious treatment alternative, or else the whole idea is unconstitutional. Here’s something from the New York Supreme Court ruling on the matter, which ruled that AA was a religious treatment program and hence could not be forced upon anyone for that reason: “The County argues further that the nonsectarian nature of the A.A. experience immunizes its use of religious symbolism and practices from Establishment Clause scrutiny. The argument is at the very least factually misleading, for the evidence showed that every meeting included at least one explicitly Christian Prayer. Furthermore, the claim that nonsectarian religious exercise falls outside the First Amendment’s scrutiny has been repeatedly rejected by the Supreme Court.”
[QUOTE=Common Tater]
I’m just not seeing this is as a legitimate problem, whatsoever, to hard-core drunks. How is anyone harmed, esp. one with alcohol abuse, by going to an AA meeting or two? Have you any experience with a true alcoholic? It’s one thing to damage oneself - a sort of slow motion suicide, really - but alcoholics affect everyone around them - and not favorably. AA has been a - dare I say it? real blessing to not only the drunk, but their families. Further, they aren’t espousing any particular flavor of religion, and in any event - if “these sorts of ideas that are often being preached” keep someone out of the gutter and back in amongst the living, how is that a bad thing again?
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When someone is a mess is not a good time to get free reign to sell your ideology, not even if that ideology were only one about addiction.
There is, of course, a rather huge difference between various AA chapters. Some are little more than vaguely connected with AA’s founding traditions and program. and are little different from support groups in general.
[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
That isn’t most. It is one study that wasn’t even done in the U.S. (Italy). One study almost always means little in science and the way that studies and statistics work, single studies cannot prove negative results (no differences between groups). Furthermore, some respected American academics from Harvard and Columbia are quoted as saying that they don’t believe the results because there research has already supported some of the AA techniques.
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This is just one of many studies showing the same result: some, like The Outpatient Treatment of Alcoholism: A Review and Comparative Study, Baltimore: University Park Press, 1980 found that AA had worse outcomes than no treatment at all. Even pro-AA researchers like George Vaillant don’t deny that more people get over alcoholism without an AA program than with it, that less than 5% of attendees stick with AA regardless (making virtually all of its success stories self-selecting).
The real harm AA does for addiction recovery has been the high degree of irrationality and dogma its foisted and spread on treatment programs, all of it divorced from any real world understanding of whether what it’s doing is working well or not. I don’t think AA is bad in and of itself: for some people it fits what they need, and works for them (though, another dispiriting set of studies has shown that the concept of “fitting” a person to a treatment program doesn’t seem to have much helpful effect either). The problem is the way in which AA has come to dominate treatment as “the” approach, despite any evidence that it is particularly better than anything else, and oftentimes when its key dogmas (like it’s black/white vision of drinking and alcoholism and insistence that it is an uncurable lifelong disease) run directly against most science on the subject.