The rise and rise of SMART Recovery
The core mission of SMART Recovery is to make our peer led mutual aid meetings available to as many people as possible and help these meetings run well. How many meetings we have and whether the numbers are growing is something we care about! We are therefore excited to report that we now have 89 peer led meetings per week in the UK - this is up from 62 meetings back in January, or a 43% increase in just seven months. A huge thank you to all the volunteer Facilitators that have made this happen.
At the time of writing we have had 680 applicants for the training course (up from 280 in January). The total actually enrolled is 294, of whom half are peers and half Champions. There have now been 124 people complete the Getting SMART (first half of the course), up from 23 in January. We have detailed feedback on user satisfaction. This remains very favourable. 66 people have now completed the full training course, which is likely to have taken about 20 hours per person.
And the Partnership scheme grows
The launch of the partnership scheme has exceeded expectations. Our target was for 100 sites by September 2011, though we now have 92 partnership sites sites fully signed up. There are a further 40 sites for which we have in writing confirmation that they will join the scheme. Many of the signed up sites have already got both Champions and peers onto the training.
In addition to the care or treatment organisations that have become partners, a number of commissioning bodies are working with us to help roll out SMART Recovey in their areas. In Bristol, most treatment providers are joining the partnership scheme and we are providing some additional training. A member of the Safer Bristol team is also providing some project management support to help get things off the ground. The project has already helped kick-start the peer led meetings and we have added two Bristol meetings in recent months. Other areas are discussing a similar approach. An alternative approach is being taken in the Lothians region of Scotland, where three ADP areas have jointly funded a one year SMART Recovery Regional Coordinator to help us kick start lots of meetings, in an area where there are currently almost none. An experienced Facilitator, Jardine Simpson has now started work helping with this project.
There is also a great deal of interest in the prison service about how SMART Recovery might help shift treatment to be more focussed on recovery. We have some guidance for prisons and a number of prisons have now signed up as partners. We are also very excited by the possabilities of the Drug Recovery Wing proposals in the drugs strategy (for England) and several of the pilot sites are looking to include SMART Recovery. Some of you might have heard mention of InsideOut. This is a group-work programme based on SMART Recovery and developed in the US under a $1m government grant. The programme introduces people to SMART Recovery whilst in prison and teachs tools to support their recovery and attend meetings on release. It's a great programme and the great news is that we have now recieved permission to use this in the UK.
As interest and involvement in SMART Recovery blossoms the likelihood of new groups ‘inspired by SMART Recovery’ grows! If SMART Recovery were a commercial operation, this would be a bad thing, but we are a charity and promoting recovery is our number one goal. Of course, we think that SMART Recovery is wonderful and can help a wide range of people, but if we say that the fellowships are not for everyone we must have the humility to accept that SMART Recovery might not be for everyone either!
We should therefore welcome others setting up other groups as alternatives to both the fellowships and also to SMART Recovery. If some of these are inspired by SMART Recovery, we should be proud of this as a contribution to the broader Recovery movement.
You can probably hear the ‘but’ coming round the corner!
There is however only a small step from inspiration to imitation. Though imitation may be the best form of flattery, there is a limit as to how much imitation is reasonable or fair. Over the 20 years since SMART Recovery was founded, dozens of attempts have been made to try and hijack the name, make money from SMART or rip off the programme to create groups under new names but using the same programme. Thankfully, the founders had registered as a charity, trademarked the name and made sure materials were copyrighted. It has therefore been pretty easy to keep these things in check, usually without the need for lawyers!
There is still some confusion around all this in the UK. A common question asked of us is why, if REBT / CBT is in the public domain, users and services cannot simply run groups like SMART Recovery without involving our organisation. There is a short and a long answer to this.
The short answer is of course, they can! The slightly longer but more helpful answer is that they can, as long as they don’t use material belonging to SMART Recovery and don’t breach the trademark. What this means in practice, is that nothing from the SMART Recovery handbooks, manuals, website and so on should be used in a service or meeting that is not called SMART Recovery. The ideas are not copyrighted, but words are. Also, the name of any new group must not be suggestive of a connection to SMART Recovery.
The issues are similar to the circumstances of the creation of SMART Recovery itself. Many of the founders had been interested in ‘Rational Recovery’, but thought there was a need for a ‘not for profit’ approach. To avoid breaching any copyright, they wrote a new programme from scratch, getting permission for various bits of content and writing an original work that is owned by the charity.
So the bottom line is that we whole-heartedly welcome new and alternative groups, programmes and movements, including those based on CBT or REBT - as long as they are not just a re-tread knock off from SMART Recovery!
I hope that writing this actually helps the issue rather than fans the flames. The problem has been that fending these things off has taken up quite a bit of our time and it seemed worth beginning to getting the word out that this is something we having to deal with. As always, if this raises any concerns or questions please do get in touch.
Keep on SMARTing
Richard and Carol