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October 2012 |
drinkanddrugsnews
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Roland Lamb
‘They’d go into our detoxes
and our residential
treatment programmes
and in less than six
months they’d be back.’
Roland Lamb
GE
Although he’s been at the helm in Philadelphia for five years, he’s spent the
whole of his 37-year working life in the addictions field, with his interest
stemming partly from personal experience. ‘As a young man I got into drugs and
enjoyed it maybe to the point where it was a problem. It didn’t keep me from
going through school and graduating from college, but it kept me from doing a
lot of other things. Then I became interested in wanting to work with young
people, mainly in the area of addiction, and I’ve been doing that ever since.’
There’s no shortage of need for that work, as Philadelphia continues to
struggle with challenging social problems, particularly around drug-related
violence, although crime rates have fallen from their high five years ago. ‘We also
have a homeless issue and we were bringing down our incarceration numbers
but because of the cutbacks and so on those things are going back up again. But
we need to maintain activity in our city system as far as continuing to move folks
towards recovery – the longer people stay in the community in their recovery they
are outside of that recycling and we’re just dealing with new faces in that cycle.
We need to continue to keep people in the community.’
*****
Recovery-orientated systems of care are more developed in the US than the UK –
is there anything that people here might find surprising in the way Philadelphia
is doing things? ‘For us, everything begins with the people who are in recovery,’
he says. ‘Solutions, collaborations and partnerships begin in the community, and
there’s no exclusion. We’re all accountable for recovery and we are all citizens of a
larger community of recovery, and for that reason we began in the community –
we had meetings in churches and different community venues, forming boards
and inviting input from all over the place.
‘We’re still looking for new ways to connect to groups who hold anonymity as
their calling card, for example – you can remain anonymous but we want to
support you too,’ he continues. ‘We need to create a free flow of traffic so you
have your professional side – the licensed treatment programmes – but then you
have all the riches of the community with people creating all kinds of activities.
They need to be a part of professional care, and professional care needs to be
accessible to those folks in the community.’
Definitions of recovery can be a tricky issue in the UK, but Philadelphia has
come up with ‘an evolving definition’ of their approach, seeing recovery as ‘the
process of pursuing a fulfilling and contributing life regardless of the difficulties
one has faced’ and involving the ‘continued enhancement of a positive identity
and personally meaningful connections and roles in one’s community’.
Is Philadelphia fairly unique or is this becoming a more common model? ‘It’s a
struggle,’ he says. ‘When I travel around the country, I see it mostly being done on
a state level. We have an advantage, being a city of 1.4m people having access to
the dollars that we do for behavioural health, and we’re still sort of an anomaly. A
lot of the efforts that you see around recovery are state efforts and they’re a lot
slower because you’re talking about trying to move this concept across
geographically separated counties, whereas we’re all in one place.’
Ultimately, it all comes back to that focus on the long-term, he says. ‘It’s a lot
like the soldiers coming back from overseas to a community – they don’t know
where they are, don’t know their place, don’t know how to function, and we’re
seeing suicides. In some ways a post-traumatic reaction to an addictive career is
not too much unlike that. It’s very much about long-term support.’
DDN
Above: Roland Lamb at the 2011 America Honours Recovery event. Courtesy of
Faces and Voices of Recovery.