Description
NARCONON Drug and Alcohol RehabilitationThe NARCONON Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation programme steps are entirely drug-free; that is, the NARCONON programme does not use drugs or medications to solve the problems caused by drugs or alcohol abuse, but does use nutrition and nutritional supplements as an important component of its delivery. Thus the programme is neither psychiatric nor medical, but a social education model of rehabilitation.
Persons enrolling in the programme must be given a full medical physical and a GP's permission to do the programme with periodic medical review as individually needed. However, NARCONON clients are not considered or treated as "patients" but as "students" who are learning to regain control of their lives. This is an important distinction. A NARCONON student does not enrol to recover from an illness; they enrol to learn something that he doesn't already know. He addresses the disability caused by drug use with new abilities, new skills for life.
NARCONON staff prepare graduating students with re-entry programmes to follow as they re-start their lives on a new foot. But the full NARCONON programme is intended to produce graduates who can stand on their own feet and live drug or alcohol free, ethical lives thereafter. A NARCONON graduate does not go to weekly meetings for months after completion, nor do they describe themselves as "recovering."
A student who has graduated from the NARCONON programme has recovered. He or she has obtained a new orientation in life. The premise of the NARCONON model is that a former addict or alcoholic can achieve a new life. This goal applies (and is routinely achieved) whether the programme is delivered in a residential centre, daily after work, or even in prison.
Once through the programme and well, if they use the tools they have practiced and learned at a NARCONON centre, a NARCONON graduate can stay well. This is not theoretical. There are three decades of graduates who will swear by it.
If graduates do run into serious difficulties, they return to their NARCONON centre where they inevitably find a specific part of the programme that they earlier failed to fully understand and therefore could not apply in the travails of daily life. But the majority get it the first time through.
The NARCONON programme takes three to five months. During this time, some might consider the NARCONON programme a "therapeutic community", but it would be more appropriate to say that NARCONON clients are going "back to college" this time to get real tools for real life.
A NARCONON Programme Graduate is someone
- Who has completed the NARCONON programme;
- Who knows he is, in fact, capable of living a drug-free, alcohol-free life thereafter;
- Who has improved his or her ability to learn and thus can accept new ideas on how to change life for the better;
- Who has personally absorbed the fundamentals of ethics and morality well enough that he or she can be productive and can contribute to society and will have no further troubles with the legal system;
- Who knows how to solve the problems of life in a rational manner to the best of his ability, without the use of mind-altering drugs or blocking out their troubles with alcohol.
- Each NARCONON programme graduate is expected, no matter the severity of his or her earlier life experience, to achieve and to live a stably drug-free, alcohol free ethical life, once and for all.
There is no such thing as a "victim" in the NARCONON programme way of thinking. Even if life has dealt one a bad hand of cards, the road out is through personal recognition of responsibility for one's own condition.
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