Sometimes, I look at the addiction and mental health treatment fields and think, ‘What a bloody mess! Why do we continue to do the wrong things so often and end up not helping people and even adding to their woes?’ It’s not rocket science working out how to improve our treatment systems and ensure that more people find long-term recovery. Here are some thoughts from someone I hold in the highest regard, Rhoda Emlyn-Jones OBE, who was talking to her good friend Wulf Livingston.
What Helped Most? [1 Film, 3’02”]
If we are going to improve our treatment services, then we need to ask people who have responded well to the help we have provided, “What was it that helped most?”
In her conversation with Wulf, Rhoda Emlyn-Jones points out that when you ask people what worked most for them, they say, “Someone listened to me. They truly heard me and understood me.”
Rhoda goes on to say: ‘There are general universal things that we need to do to respond well to people. And the most unhelpful thing to do is to create stereotypes, to label people, to block people from the help at the moment they are inviting it in.
Give people no more, and no less than they need to take that journey through to an outcome they’ve been able to articulate with you, that they’ve never been able to articulate with anyone else because no one’s listening. So we really need to create that momentum, don’t we, for all of our services.’