Synopses & Reviews
Despite the widely accepted view that formal treatment and twelve-step groups are essential for overcoming dependencies on alcohol and drugs, each year large numbers of former addicts quietly recover on their own, without any formal treatment or participation in self-help groups at all.
Coming Clean explores the untold stories of untreated addicts who have recovered from a lifestyle of excessive and compulsive substance use without professional assistance. Based on 46 in-depth interviews with formerly addicted individuals, this controversial volume examines their reasons for avoiding treatment, the strategies they employed to break away from their dependencies, the circumstances that facilitated untreated recovery, and the implications of recovery without treatment for treatment professionals as well as for prevention and drug policy.
Because of the pervasive belief that addiction is a disease requiring formal intervention, few training programs for physicians, social workers, psychologists, and other health professionals explore the phenomenon of natural recovery from addiction. Coming Clean offers insights for treatment professionals of how recovery without treatment can work and how candidates for this approach can be identified. A detailed appendix outlines specific strategies which will be of interest to addicted individuals themselves who wish to attempt the process of recovery without treatment.
Review
"Skillfully moves the dialogue from whether or not we should have children to how it is we actually, actively do this thing of being families. . . . Makes important distinctions between the health of our families internally and the effects of the outside world on our development as parents and on our children's development. Johnson and O'Connor engage readers to objectively view our families, the bonds we form, and the egalitarian models that we create for our children without apology and with clarity and respect for this generation of intentional families that has the potential to change the world."-Aimee Gelnaw,Executive Director, Family Pride Coalition
Review
"Serves to advance the understanding of lgbt families in the U.S. today, and helps provide guideposts for members of same-sex households as they pioneer new family formations."-Terry Boggis,Director, Center Kids, The family program of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center, New York
Review
"Perhaps many heterosexual couples with children and less than harmonious households could learn something."-New York Times,
Review
"An effortless how-to book that would be recommended hand-me-down reading for prospective same-sex parents from those who've fingered the pages within."-Metapsychology Online Book Review,
Synopsis
Untold stories of people with substance addictions who have recovered without formal treatment
Despite the widely accepted view that formal treatment and twelve-step groups are essential for overcoming dependencies on alcohol and drugs, each year large numbers of former addicts quietly recover on their own, without any formal treatment or participation in self-help groups at all.
Coming Clean explores the untold stories of untreated addicts who have recovered from a lifestyle of excessive and compulsive substance use without professional assistance. Based on 46 in-depth interviews with formerly addicted individuals, this controversial volume examines their reasons for avoiding treatment, the strategies they employed to break away from their dependencies, the circumstances that facilitated untreated recovery, and the implications of recovery without treatment for treatment professionals as well as for prevention and drug policy.
Because of the pervasive belief that addiction is a disease requiring formal intervention, few training programs for physicians, social workers, psychologists, and other health professionals explore the phenomenon of natural recovery from addiction. Coming Clean offers insights for treatment professionals of how recovery without treatment can work and how candidates for this approach can be identified. A detailed appendix outlines specific strategies which will be of interest to addicted individuals themselves who wish to attempt the process of recovery without treatment.
Synopsis
The gay and lesbian community is experiencing a baby boom. Advances in gay rights coupled with increased availability of alternative reproduction techniques have led to an unprecedented number of openly gay and lesbian parents. Estimates are that between 6 and 14 million children in the United States are being raised by at least one parent who is gay. Yet, very little is known about how gay or lesbian headed families function, or whether they differ in any relevant ways from families headed by straight parents.
Written by two developmental psychologists, The Gay Baby Boom reports the findings of The Gay and Lesbian Family Study, the largest national assessment of gay and lesbian headed families. By asking participants detailed questions about the way they parent, the authors are able to describe for the first time exactly what takes place within gay and lesbian headed families across the county. Traditional research has tended to assume that there is something uniquely different and potentially psychologically damaging about children being raised by gays. The authors draw on their data to show these fears unfounded.
About the Author
Robert Granfield is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Denver. They are the co-authors of
Coming Clean: Overcoming Addiction without Treatment (also available from NYU Press) and have each taught, conducted research, and worked in the field of addiction for over twenty-five years.
William Cloud is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Denver, where he developed and has been chair of the Drug Dependency Concentration in the M.S.W. program.