David and Wulf initially interviewed five people—James Deakin, Huseyin Djemil, Dr. Wendy Dossett, Marcus Fair and Dr. David McCartney—who are in long-term recovery from addiction and have worked in one capacity or other in the addiction recovery field. David also interviewed Wulf, a long-time Friend of Recovery. All interviews were completed using Zoom (David) or Microsoft Teams (Wulf). Some interviewees participated in more than one interview.
The films of these interviews were edited by David in two ways. Firstly, he edited the original films into a series of shorter films (mostly 4-10 minutes long) which are ‘archived’ in the People section of the website in the order they occurred in the interview. Each People post contains a summary of the interview, brief biography of the person (with relevant links), along with details of the films that have been edited from the original, i.e. titles, summaries and links to the film on our Recovery Voices YouTube channel.
Please note that due to the interviews being conducted online, the cinematic quality is variable. For this, we apologise. However, we believe that any shortcoming in visual quality is made up for by the quality of the content.
These films are used in our Stories section, which contain stories focused on a wide range of matters related to recovery and addiction. These Stories contain one or more films taken from a single person’s interview. Examples of Stories are Descent Into Addiction, Drug Addict to Filmmaker, and A Family Trauma.
The Themes section of the website includes films of our interviewees that are focusing on specific topics related to recovery, addiction, treatment, community, and other matters. The films have been created by re-editing our original film into short (almost always less than three minutes) clips, and then ‘linking’ the appropriate clips by using YouTube Playlists. The Theme films (e.g. Recovery Advocacy, Shame, and Connection) are compiled from material involving one or more of our interviewees.
The Communities section of our website contains a series of pages devoted initially to three different types of peer-led recovery communities: Eternal Media, North Wales Recovery Communities (NWRC), and Towards Recovery. We devote a lead-in page to each community which contains a summary of the initiative, a film, a photographic slideshow, a series of quotes about recovery (‘Our Voices’), and an embedded playlist of YouTube films made by the recovery community or films in which the community (NWRC) participated.
These Communities pages also have four boxes which each lead off to another page. These pages either contain summaries, titles and links to films about the community that are from interview films in the People archive, or contain content generated by members of the community (e.g. a blog post from Huseyin Djemil of Towards Recovery, or a list of podcasts made by the recovery community).
The idea of our Blog is that we will regularly be posting a wide variety of different content. The page will not only contain posts related to our Recovery Voices interviews, but also include key information about addiction, recovery and treatment, latest happenings within the recovery communities with which we are collaborating, and relevant news and information from the wider world. We also hope to have contributions from guest bloggers from time-to-time.
The Extras section contains a wide range of content from our sister website, Recovery Stories, which David created back in 2013. There are five sub-sections to Extras, namely Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD), Articles, Healing Trauma, Indigenous Healing, and Recovery Stories.
The website also contains a Home Page, Project Page, of which this page is a part, and a Contact Us page.
We wish to express our sincere thanks to those people who are participating in our project.