| On any given day an estimated 900,000 people in the U.S. are in treatment programs for substance abuse. Most of those treatment facilities have literature racks for their patients/clients. Most of those literature racks carry only one kind of literature -- the 12-Step kind. It doesn't have to be so. Literature racks in treatment programs can offer the person in recovery a choice, and can bring people to our LifeRing meetings who would otherwise never have known about us.
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 Here are some photographs of literature racks in treatment facilities where LifeRing brochures are available. The rack at the right is a standard commercial 12-pocket plastic wall display, mounted in the dual diagnosis ward at Herrick Hospital in Berkeley CA. A small selection of the omnipresent AA literature is in the top row. The five main LifeRing handouts are in the bottom row. Do you recognize them by sight? They are from the left, the San Francisco Bay Area meeting schedule (ivory), the unhooked.com brochure (blue), and then the "3S" trilogy: Sobriety Is Our Priority (green), Secular Is Our Middle Name (gray), and Self-Help Is What We Do (pink). This rack has an empty pocket just waiting for our next brochure. |
 The next picture shows a custom-made wooden wall rack mounted in the Merritt-Peralta Institute, a 28-day inpatient program, on the 5th floor of Summit Hospital in Oakland, CA This rack was built for full-sheet (8 1/2 x 11) handouts, and standard trifold brochures like ours pretty much sink out of sight into its pockets. Staff assigned us the top rack, and our handouts were all but invisible until a clever friendly patient stuffed a towel into the bottom of the bin so that our pieces would be seen. There isn't enough room to display all the brochures, but it's better than nothing. As in most treatment facilities, the meeting schedules are the fastest-moving items. This rack generally presents a somewhat messy appearance, and I can proudly say that our own shelf usually gets tended to more often, and is more up to date, than that of many of the other organizations with whom we share the rack. Some of the other bins have literature three years out of date, and some have stood empty for months. When we run out of LifeRing meeting schedules in this rack, I usually hear about it immediately, and if I forget to bring a resupply some week, I get raised eyebrows. |
 The next rack is at the Chemical Dependency Recovery Program of the Kaiser Permanente HMO in Oakland. It's a clear plastic six-pocket commercial rack, available at office stores, that is designed to stand freely on a table. In this treatment facility, AA has a large wire literature rack with space for about 24 different brochures, but there is no place for that rack other than down on the floor, where it's hard to see and presents a trip hazard. For a while we stuffed our brochures into some of the empty pockets in that rack but this didn't seem right. Finally LifeRing member Syl S. hit on the solution of buying our own rack, the cost of which she generously donated. Syl originally obtained a wall rack similar to the first one shown above, but staff denied permission to mount anything on the walls, citing fire regulations. But staff had no problem with a table rack. The display is positioned on a side table within easy view and reach of patients seated in the waiting area near the reception booth of this outpatient facility. Syl made a bright neon label for the front. We use two pockets for meeting schedules here because of the heavy demand for that item. Having our own rack, and such a nice looking one in such a favorable position, is a very pleasing thing, and the literature in it moves at a steady clip into patients' hands. |
 Last is a single-pocket standup rack -- also a standard office supply store item -- that holds meeting schedules. A label on the rack tells what is in it and gives the Service Center phone number to call for refills and information. We are experimenting with placing these racks in churches, coffee houses, grocery stores and other appropriate sites, wherever someone volunteers to keep them refilled. If you want one of these racks and are willing to keep it supplied, call the Service Center at 510-763-0779. |
Literature racks can reach people when you're not present. They never sleep and never go on holiday. They offer their freight of wisdom and support without commentary or attitude. But they are only as good as the hand that fills them and tends them. A literature rack reflects on the organization. A rack that long stands messy or empty bespeaks an organization that has stopped caring or has sunk into chaos. A rack that regularly gets tended and refilled testifies to an organization that has its act together and that cares about people and wants to be approached. Getting our literature into literature racks in treatment facilities is not always easy. In many cases, permission to stock literature comes along with permission to hold a meeting on the facility, and not before. Thus the literature in the rack helps bring people to the meeting, and the people in the meeting help resupply the rack. But in other cases, we can get literature into a facility before we have a meeting there, on the ground that the patients are looking for meetings anywhere in the community and have an interest in our area-wide meeting schedule. A number of patients in treatment facilities do not obtain any benefit from the traditional 12-Step approaches, and live in a state of frustration or despair because they are unaware that there are other roads to sobriety. A well-stocked literature rack with LifeRing handouts in it can be their first news that other choices exist. I know people who say that they are still clean and sober today because they found LifeRing from a handout in a literature rack. Getting LifeRing literature into treatment center literature racks presents many patients for the first time with a choice of recovery paths, and saves lives that might otherwise be lost. |
Wednesday, June 27, 2001
Literature Racks Can Offer the Person in Treatment a Choice of Support Groups
Sunday, November 26, 2000
A Sample Letter to Local Referral Sources
This sample is based on a letter that Sue G. sent out to substance abuse treatment providers in the Buffalo area when she opened the meeting. It has generated a good response, and the meeting receives referrals from some of the providers. It proves that letters of this type needn't be complicated. It probably didn't hurt that Sue G. is herself a social service professional with name recognition in the local service provider community. -- Ed.
Dear Service Provider:
I am writing to introduce a new self-help group to your agency. SOAR (Secular Organization for Addiction Recovery) is a local group for people suffering from addictions, which is based on the principles of LifeRing Secular Recovery.
SOAR is an alternative concept that doesn't use the twelve-step philosophy in addiction recovery, rather, it is based on individuals using self-help and learning through experimentation. Steps to recovery are not the focus, but total abstinence from the addictive behavior is the goal. This philosophy recognizes that there is no set pathway to recovery, that no one approach will work for every person. Group members are encouraged to share with each other what works for them, and members can pick and choose their own approach to staying clean and sober.
I have enclosed some more detailed information for your perusal. Please feel free to copy anything that you would like to post or hand out, and to call me at the number on the flier if you have any questions.
I am looking forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Susan J. Gibbons, Convenor
Posted 11/26/00
Saturday, September 30, 2000
Announcing Our Third San Francisco Meeting With a Mailing to Local Treatment Providers
On Sept. 27, the LSR Service Center in the persons of Gillian E., Marjorie J. and Marty N. got out a mailing to 110 San Francisco treatment providers announcing the opening of our third San Francisco meeting.
The mailing consisted of a cover letter (PDF copy attached), a flyer suitable for posting (PDF copy attached), a flyer promoting the forthcoming new book, Presenting LifeRing Secular Recovery: a Selection of Readings for Treatment Professionals (PDF copy of flyer attached), and a copy of our local area meeting schedule.
We used the mailing list previously downloaded from SAMHSA as described previously.
It took the three of us about two hours to produce the mailing from composition to mailbox. Total cost around $65.
-- Marty N.
Saturday, August 5, 2000
A Targeted Mailing From the Service Center to Rochester MN Treatment Facilities
In an earlier article, I described a mailing the Service Center sent out to treatment providers in the city of San Francisco. The data source for that mailing was the online Substance Abuse Facility Locator created in January 2000 by SAMHSA (the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
In the earlier article I complained that the SAMHSA database was posted in an elaborate screen format that made it laborious to download the data. Since then, SAMHSA has posted its database in raw table format, which makes it almost a breeze to download the data and use it in a mailmerge project, such as this one to Rochester MN.
To access this database in computer-readable format, point your browser to
This is the start page for the Drug and Alcohol Services Information System. From there, click on
which gets you to http://wwwdasis.samhsa.gov/ows-bin/owa/NFRFTP$.Startup , a listing of databases in .zip file format, by state. Click on the state you want. Up comes a screen that invites you to click to download a .zip file. Click and save the file to your disk in a location where you can find it again. Then use PKZIP or any functional equivalent, such as WinZip, to open the .zip file and extract its contents to your disk. The contents of the .zip file (for Minnesota) consist of three separate files:
- mn_rpt.txt
- mn_dat.txt
- readme.txt
The file you want is mn_dat.txt. This contains the facilities data in plain text (ASCII) format with fixed-length records separated by a vertical line | as delimiter. Either the fixed-length format or the delimiter would have been enough, but I guess SAMHSA wanted to make sure, so they gave us both.
Next I imported the dat.txt file into Microsoft Access. Probably any other database will handle the information equally well, and you might even be able to use the dat.txt file directly as a Mailmerge data file in your word processor, if you massage it a bit. I used Access. If you are using Access, the procedure is this:
Create a new blank Access database. On the File menu, click on "Get External Data" and then on "Import." In the file browse box that opens, set the file type to "Text files." Find the directory where you stored the mn_dat.txt file. Click on it. Then click "Import." When the "Import Text Wizard" opens, click on "Delimited." Then click "Next." Where it asks you to "Choose the delimiter," click on "Other" and enter the vertical bar | in the field next to "other." Also click "First Row Contains Field Names." Click "Finish." You should in moments have a new Access table named "mn_dat." Open it and you will see a listing of 312 facility names and addresses.
Next, create a new Access query on the table, so as to pull out the Rochester records. If you know the target zip codes you could query by that field. I simply entered "Rochester or Winona" in the "address" field. (A quick spot check showed that the smaller towns in the vicinity of Rochester had no listings.) A short list of 20 facilities resulted. Inspecting the data showed that the street address field in one record was blank. I manually copied the "mailing address" data into this field so as to create a usable record. (If you run into a lot of data problems of this kind, more complicated methods of massaging the data are available.) I saved the query as "RochesterMN" and closed Access.
It was then a straightforward process of creating the form letter and a mailing label in MS Word, linking to the new "RochesterMN" query as data source, and running the job on the printer. After that it's collate-stuff-and-lick, and it's done.
A word about the economics of this project. This was an expensive mailing. The "Treatment booklet" in photocopy format, tape bound, costs $4.40 each. Add 40 cents for the 4 brochures, plus about 30 cents for the envelope, cover sheet, and mailing label. Add $1.65 for postage. Total $6.75 each. Total cost for this small mailing: $135.00, labor donated. I thought it was worth doing because of the long-term importance of gaining a toe-hold in Minnesota, the bastion of the "Minnesota Model" -- and to back up the excellent work that the local convenor, Roger L., has done in obtaining a room, getting local press coverage, and distributing flyers.
If the treatment providers send their clients to the meeting, and if the clients put money in the meeting basket, and if the meeting treasurer sends the basket surplus over local needs to the Service Center, then the Service Center will be in a financial position to continue this kind of service indefinitely. I am more than happy to donate my labor to the extent practicable, but I hope people understand that the Service Center cannot at this early point in our development afford to do this kind of mailing for each and every locality where a new meeting gets underway. I am posting the how-to instructions here with the thought that computer-savvy local convenors can use local initiative for similar efforts.
One measure that will cut the cost of this kind of mailing substantially is to get the "Treatment booklet" printed commercially. The LifeRing Board of Directors have approved a proposal to print this item as a paperbound book, half-sheet format, with glossy cover and spot color. This will reduce the cost per copy from $4.40 to $2.04 each, and make for a more attractive and professional presentation besides. The postage should also be slightly cheaper, and we can use a more attractive half-size envelope. Look for the announcement that the print edition is ready around mid-September.
-- Marty N. 8/5/00
Friday, March 3, 2000
"One More Arrow In the Quiver"
Report on a presentation to staff and patients of a 12-Step treatment facility
By Marty N.
This morning (1/27/00) Marjorie J and I presented the LifeRing approach to a "doctor's hour" meeting of patients and some staff at the Merritt-Peralta Institute (MPI) in Oakland. The MPI is a unit in Oakland’s privately owned Summit mega-hospital located on Pill Hill in midtown. About 30 persons were present, seated around a long table in the board room. The MPI has a reputation for being a hard-core traditional 12-Step treatment facility. Knowledgeable sources have described it without malice as a Step-Nazi citadel. It is one of the largest inpatient facilities and is, after Kaiser, one of the largest outpatient programs in the S.F. Bay Area.
In the reception area on the fifth floor there is a placard containing the 12 Steps in red letters about 2 inches high; this is framed behind glass in a wood case about three feet by four feet. The frame is bolted to the wall with ¼” thick carriage bolts. You can’t miss it. The literature rack is filled with AA and NA schedules in messy profusion. There is an MPI alumni newsletter that contains nothing but 12-Step homilies.
How, you may ask, did we get invited to present our program to this staff? The bottom line answer is: patient demand. The medical director of the facility told us that they were constantly encountering patients who did not want to have anything to do with the 12-Step program, and he, the director, did not know where to send them or what to do with them. So, if you are ever a patient in a treatment facility and you have problems with the 12-Step approach, be sure to register your concerns. You may not see immediate changes, but the cumulative impact of your pressure over a period of time may eventually create an opening for change, as in this case. There are individual treatment professionals in every facility I have had contact with who, like this physician, are driven by a desire to help the patient, over and above any personal 12-step affiliations, and who realize from daily professional experience that the 12-Step approach just does not cut it for a number of their patients. Patient demand is driving these professionals to look for alternatives. Patient demand combined with staff professionalism is what got us invited to this citadel of traditionalism. As far as I know, we are the first and only non-Step group to ever be invited there.
Our host told us before we began that he did not want to polarize the issue into Us v. Them, and did not want to have the session turn into a debate. He wanted us to be seen as a complement and an adjunct to their traditional program, one more arrow in the quiver, not as a rival or a competitor. This is a situation with which everyone who advocates for a secular alternative has to deal. It’s all a lot of fun to polemicize with faceless dodecamaniacs on the Internet, but when you’re talking to a staff meeting and your objective is to win approval to hold a meeting on the premises, the word is: be positive. Our experience in talking to the Kaiser groups in Oakland over the past three years came in very useful here.
In this case, I began by telling about my own recovery. I said that I had 7 years 3 months and 25 days clean and sober, all of it in SOS/LSR, and had never attended any 12-Step meeting. I described LSR/SOS as a supportive, tool-rich environment where people are encouraged to build their own recovery programs, taking what they need for their individual recovery. Then, by way of example, I outlined my own personal 1-2-3 program (do something every day, go to meetings, use the Sobriety Priority as a decision-making tool) along the lines I’ve written in my story in the Handbook. The audience members could see nothing objectionable in this approach, which is in its secular way quite traditional, and it seemed to reassure them at the outset that we were sound.
Then, I explained the concept of the drunk self and the sober self at war in the user/abuser. By drawing cartoon heads on the whiteboard, I was able to show the small, weak, sober self becoming empowered by interaction and support via the meetings, and becoming dominant within the person. This is a plausible, intuitively correct model of recovery, presented in an entirely positive way without polemics. Only later will some in the audience realize that this simple and sensible recovery model requires no Higher Powers. Like Occam's razor, it has no need of the God hypothesis. I concluded with a few words of gratitude toward the LSR/SOS program for being there for me to get sober in, and with appreciation for my new sober life.
Marjorie then took the floor and told very movingly of finding SOS/LSR on the Internet, and how the sosmail list helped her pull herself out of drinking and isolation and helped her get sober, and how participating in LifeRing positively changed the quality of her life.
We then took questions. The first question was to describe what goes on at an LSR meeting. I read the opening statement for our SF Bay meetings out of the Handbook, and briefly described the check-in format and the topic format, emphasizing our use of crosstalk, and our practice of closing meetings with a round of applause.
I don’t remember all the questions in detail, but one of the next ones was about crosstalk. I said that we felt the process of drunks talking with drunks was central to making the sober place inside us stronger (pointing to the whiteboard and the diagram I had drawn), and for that reason we encouraged crosstalk and allowed it in either all or part of each of our meetings. Marjorie pointed out that sometimes we asked a person whether they wanted crosstalk to their share, so that a person could be protected if they felt crosstalk would threaten them. This set the questioner (a person who introduced himself saying “I’m Joe (or whatever name) and I’m an alcoholic”) grumbling to himself but without a comeback. (You need to know that AA, even though it has made an icon out of “drunks talking to drunks” does not allow crosstalk in its meetings.)
Another question was, “do you have mentors or sponsors?” I said that if a newcomer in our group felt attracted to another person’s recovery program and wanted to learn from them in particular, they were free and encouraged to approach that person and form a closer relationship with them. But we had never formalized these relationships. The reason is partly historical. When AA began, meetings were underground and you had to be invited; the person who brought you was your “sponsor.” But today meetings are publicly announced, so there isn’t any need for this role, really. Besides, I said, formalizing the relationship scares us; sponsors have a lot of power, but there isn’t any exam, or any standards, or licensing board, and that worries us; so we’ve kept mentoring strictly informal. The questioner did not pursue this and seemed satisfied.
One person wanted to know the history. I told briefly of how the founder got sober in AA in 1978 but then felt he had to start on a new foundation, and began SSG, and so on. Another questioner (another one who began “I’m Joe and I’m an alcoholic”) took off on this and asked a very interesting question that I had never heard before. He said, what was it the founder could not handle in AA? What was the thing that made him finally decide to leave?
I said the thing that gave the founder cold sweats and finally made him leave AA was the thought “what if God wants me to drink?” He realized in that case he would have to tell God to go to hell. And when he thought about the implications of that, he realized he had to start a program that was not God-based, but was based on the Sobriety Priority. The questioner took this answer very seriously and did not argue with it.
Someone asked whether we were just for atheists and agnostics. I explained that we were not atheist/agnostic but secular, meaning that people of all faiths and none were welcome, and that neither religion nor anti-religion were business that came up in the meetings. I said that people with very definite religious beliefs felt comfortable in our group because our process did not require them to amend the beliefs they came in with.
The same questioner who had asked about the founder then volunteered that he had attended a couple of our meetings and found that, as far as religion goes, in our program “you get to keep what you have.” I think this is a very good expression.
Another questioner asked, skeptically, “is this some kind of experimental program? Have there been any studies done as to whether it works or not?” I answered that as to studies, there was the 1996 study by Connors and Dermen, a copy of which was included in the presentation packet we put together and handed out. Admittedly, I said, this was not a comparative study with a control group, which was the only way to really find out anything scientifically. But then, scientific studies with control groups had never been done for AA or NA either, except in rare instances and with mixed results. If anyone in this room would like to study our group in a scientific way, I said, I’m sure we would be glad to cooperate; please to talk to me afterward. As for being “experimental,” I said we gladly copped to that, we were still learning and developing and trying things out, and I hoped that we would always be listening and learning and developing, and that if we ever got to the point where we thought we had the final answer on how to get you, you, and you, and everyone in the world sober, we would become obnoxious. (I had sense enough to stop there and take another question.)
A questioner wanted to know about our history locally and our name change, and where did we have meetings. I dealt with the name change very briefly: we got involved in litigation with another group that claimed rights to the name and we lost and the court made us change our name. End of story. As to history, I pointed out that our first local meeting was on March 17, 1988, and this meeting was still going, and in fact Marjorie was the current secretary of it. At this time, we have meetings in the area seven days a week, and you can do “seven in seven” in our organization. This made a strong impression on the group. I pointed out we had meetings at the Kaiser in Oakland, at Kaiser in San Francisco, at Kaiser in Richmond and at Kaiser in San Rafael, as well as at Herrick Hospital in Berkeley. This also seemed to impress, as Kaiser is the biggest chemical dependency outpatient program around here, the implication being that if Kaiser hosted our meetings, we must be OK. Also, I said, at Kaiser Oakland on Saturday morning, the patients have to attend a support group between the hours of 10 and 11, and Kaiser has AA and NA and LifeRing going side by side during this hour, patients’ choice. Several heads nodded approvingly at this concept.
When they ran out of questions, our host thanked us and again said, as he had earlier in introducing us, that he frequently had patients who resisted the 12-Step programs and he did not know what to do with them. He felt that an alternative group would be a useful addition to the program, “one more arrow in the quiver.” That seemed to express a consensus. They gave us a good hand. What happened next was completely unexpected to us. The whole group, patients and staff, linked hands and recited the Serenity Prayer, followed by some kind of rah-rah chant along the lines of “keep coming back, it works if you work it,” like at an AA meeting. We took it in stride.
Several patients and staffers talked with us afterward to express interest and support. The physician who was our host said he was pleased with the way it turned out. He joked that he hoped he still had a job after hosting our talk. He looked relaxed and upbeat. He introduced us to the program coordinator, a younger man, and the two of them agreed in our presence that we should have an evening LifeRing meeting at the facility. They would consult their calendar and get back to me. With cordial shaking of hands and thank-yous, we parted.
We left 15 copies of the Professionals’ Packet and a bundle of meeting schedules. One of the staffers said he would personally see that the schedules got into their literature rack. I will follow up about the meeting. I have been looking for a way to get a meeting at this facility for more than three years. From time to time people who have gone through their program manage to find us, and it’s always the same story: 12-Steps rammed down one’s throat, many patients not happy, looking for an alternative. Hopefully they’ll have one soon.
Credit our member B. for providing a key information link to make this happen. A little before Thanksgiving B. had a major relapse, and managed in one weekend to check himself into, and get thrown out of, both the Herrick crisis unit and the MPI unit. When he sobered up and told the story at a meeting, he happened to mention that he saw the same physician, Dr. C., at both places. That was how I learned that the Dr. C whom I already knew from the Wednesday morning Herrick meeting was also on staff at MPI. I had had no idea. The very next day I buttonholed Dr. C at Herrick and asked him whether we could start a meeting at MPI. I nagged him by phone and by letter over the holidays. Last week finally came the invitation, on five days' notice. We were ready.
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P.S. I got the call today (ten days later) that we are invited back for a second presentation, this time to staff only, on 2/24. -- MN.
Edited 3/3/00 MN.