While a sober living house doesn’t offer individual or group counseling, it offers structure and support to help you maintain your sobriety. Additionally, maintaining your sobriety typically requires a home that is free of substances. Sober living facilities are often thought of as a sober person’s pipeline to life in mainstream society.

Douglas L Polcin

Our purpose here is to summarize the most salient and relevant findings for SLHs as a community based recovery option. We then expand on the findings by considering potential implications of SLHs for treatment and criminal justice systems. We also include a discussion of our plans to study the community context of SLHs, which will depict how stakeholder influences support and hinder their operations and potential for expansion. It is important to note that social model strategies can be used to encourage the use of social sober living blog model principles to enhance the use of local services. For example, Polcin, Korcha, and Bond (2015) described how SLH residents with psychiatric disorders can provide support to one another in terms of managing symptoms and providing information about local mental health services. In addition to sharing practical information about where services are located and how to access them, they can also share personal experiences (i.e., experiential learning) that might help residents be better prepared for what to expect.

Addiction and Mental Health Resources

• A core component of sober living homes is the emphasis on personal accountability coupled with peer support.
• EM coordinated the interviewers in the field, completed the data analysis, and wrote the original draft of the manuscript.
• The outcomes of living in such an environment can include positive health, behavioral, and relationship changes.
• This could be particularly problematic in poor communities where residents have easy access to substances and people who use them.

Although there are similarities between SLH’s and other residential facilities for substance abusers, such as “halfway houses,” there are important differences as well. Unlike many halfway houses, SLH’s are financially sustained through resident fees and individuals can typically stay as long as they wish. Because they do not offer formal treatment services, they are not monitored by state licensing agencies.

The demand for sober-living residences as a path to addiction recovery

In fact, one of the most frustrating issues for addiction researchers is the extent to which interventions that have been shown to be effective are not implemented in community programs. We suggest that efforts to translate research into treatment have not sufficiently appreciated how interventions are perceived and affected by various stakeholder groups (Polcin, 2006a). We therefore suggest that there is a need to pay attention to the community context where those interventions are delivered.

• While the level of support is less intensive (and less expensive) than that offered in residential treatment, it is more intensive than the relative autonomy found in freestanding SLHs.
• Recruitment methods for participants included flyers, presentations, and referrals.
• Most items on the RHES have clear implications for how house managers can improve social model dynamics in recovery homes.
• Examining these transitions and how they play out for different residents and their communities represents critically important new directions for social model research.
• Sober living homes may or may not be accredited or licensed through a state, local, or national agency.

The resident requests the General Manager put them on the waiting List for a Phase II house which usually has a thirty to ninety day wait. For example, meeting cards to validate 12-step meeting attendance are not required, there are no curfew requirements, and overnight guests are permitted twice per week. Study procedures included recruiting residents for the research within their first week of entering the SLH. All participants signed informed consent documents and were informed that their responses were confidential. A federal certificate of confidentiality was obtained to further protect study confidentiality. We expected residents entering SLH’s who had established sobriety would maintain that sobriety, while those with recent substance use would show significant improvement.

Few differences by gender served emerged regarding sociodemographics, alcohol outlets or accessibility. When differences emerged, they were largely between coed houses and houses that served either men or women. Compared to men’s houses, coed SLHs were in neighborhoods with a lower percentage of non-Whites (33% vs 42%) and with higher median property values (876,664.8 vs https://ecosoberhouse.com/ 640,360.9). They had fewer self-help groups within a mile than women’s houses (2.1 vs 3.5) and on average were farther from the nearest self-help group than both men’s and women’s houses. Coed houses also had lower walkability scores than both men’s and women’s houses. We also included a measure of residential instability (i.e., percent of renter-occupied housing units).

Measuring the Recovery Environment

• Some sober living facilities provide substance-free transitional housing for only men or only women, meaning men live with men and women live with women.
• Street addresses for sober living houses, alcohol outlets, treatment programs, and mutual help groups were geocoded using ArcMap 10.6 (ESRI, 2018).
• We suggest engaging the issues and questions posed above into ongoing management of recovery homes represents new advances for the application of social model recovery across different levels of recovery homes.
• Americans often see the more destructive side of addiction, drug crime, people slumped in doorways and family members who are spiraling downward.