Everyone knows that there's a good deal of drinking and drug use on college campuses. Some environments, like the greek system, are known to be somewhat more extreme in this sense and there is certainly some evidence that binge drinking on campuses can affect health, sleep, and is associated with lower grades. We've already talked about the fact that despite all of this, most college students (or anyone else) who abuse alcohol or drugs are probably not addicts but there's little doubt that some of them do indeed meet addiction criteria and need help.
So what does a college student in recovery do?! How do they navigate college life while trying to say clean?
On campus recovery support programs
In a small number of colleges, they can use Campus Recovery Programs to help them stay on the right path and according to a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education one of the oldest is Texas Tech University's 25 year old program.
The thing is that these programs vary widely and are essentially set up by the local campus without any ideas about what really works for recovery support among college students or whether these programs are actually helping anyone. The reason is that no-one has been collecting data on these programs until very recently. As the article correctly points out, all the anecdotal stories about success don't mean a thing if under the surface rests a mountain of evidence showing these programs to be ineffective. It's what we researches call the "File Drawer Effect" - or how strong does the evidence against something has to be if you assume that evidence against it exists that hasn't been published or attended to. If all you have is a few stories from happy students, all that's required is a handful of research showing no real effect.
So, Texas Tech and other campuses are joining forces in order to answer a number of important question which means that hopefully we'll have a better sense of their actual impact in the near future. In particular, we would want to know if these programs are better than nothing for students who are in recovery before they come on campus - Do they stay on target for longer periods of time, have less and shorter relapses, and are their school outcomes better?
One of the things that I would love to see examined, especially since the article itself focused so heavily on 12-step approaches of support (although it didn't state that these programs are 12-step based specifically) is whether the programs support different paths, or even outcomes (Moderation, Abstinence from all drugs or only drug of choice), for recovery. As we've talked about numerous times here on All About Addiction, there is more than enough evidence to show that at best, the 12-steps are equally as effective as other approaches to addiction treatment (like CBT, MI, and CM which you cna read about if you follow the link provided) and I would sincerely hope that a college-run recovery program would take that into account.
If these programs offer a wide menu of recovery support options and are good at targeting the right population instead of pushing abstinence on every college student who is caught with a beer, I think we might just ahve ourselves a winner.
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