One of the main areas that David Best is known for related to recovery capital and its measurement. The concept of recovery capital was first described by Robert Granfield and William Cloud in their excellent 1999 book Coming Clean: Overcoming Addiction Without Treatment [1]. You can read about their work in an article I wrote some years ago, which is available on this website. Along with Alexandre Laudet, David wrote a seminal article in 2010 on recovery capital—The Potential of Recovery Capital—for a project on recovery run by the Royal Society for Arts in the UK.
In his conversation with Wulf, David talks about the concept and how it is measured with instruments that he and his colleagues have developed. He described how the measure is of far great value than treatment outcome measures such as the Maudsley Addiction profile, in which he was involved in developing in his pre-recovery days, and the Addiction Severity Index. Here are two short Theme films from the conversation about recovery capital:
Recovery Capital [5’33”]
One of the reasons for working with recovery capital is that it gave David and colleagues a metric, something they could use to count things that were meaningful in a person’s life, positive things that people would want to achieve in their recovery journey. Tools to measure outcomes of treatment only focused on the reduction of symptoms or deficits. People in a methadone maintenance clinic may be less likely to die, to get arrested and to get a blo`od borne virus, but their quality of life generally goes down.
The writing of a paper on recovery capital with Alexandre Laudet for the Royal Society for the Arts in 2010 was the beginning of 14 years of David’s work developing and refining measures and metrics based around recovery capital. Wulf emphasises that the essence of the work David has been doing is that there is something beyond treatment that is more important. The positive life-changing aspects of recovery as the person grows and evolves.