Penn State’s Consortium to Combat Substance Abuse (CCSA) had its first annual conference today. Members of the RTS lab presented a poster there focused on trying to define and understand the process of recovery at a basic level.
One primary focus of the poster was aimed at understanding something called recovery capital. The idea is pretty straightforward: these are the characteristics of a person, their holdings, and their environment and community that provide support that improves recovery. One form of recovery capital is traditional capital: if you’ve got the financial resources to be able to, for example, take 90 days off of work to go to a rehab facility, that is one characteristic that can help with your recovery. But it goes a lot further than that. Supportive relationships, community support, and a whole suite of other characteristics can contribute to recovery.
There are a wide array of paths to recovery. One of them that takes advantage of some of these aspects of recovery capital uses recovery communities to provide a variety of these different levels of support, and one application of the Wear-IT project is looking at communities like these and trying to understand what characteristics of these communities make them most effective.
The CCSA conference has turned out to be an amazing event that’s building some great connections. I’m very much looking forward to how this group advances. The conference really showed that Penn State, with its ties to prevention, outreach, treatment, and legislature across Commonwealth, really has the potential to have a tremendous impact.