By Janna Nguyen
College campuses are generally excellent at providing preventive education and treatment for student addictions. What they don’t provide is a space for recovery.
At CU-Boulder, that’s about to change.
This fall, the campus is looking to introduce a Recovery Campus Program, which will offer immediate assistance to recovering addicts.”The goal is to provide a bridge into society for people who are recovering from addiction and give them an opportunity to readapt,” said Dr. Donald Misch, director of Wardenburg Health Center, which will operate the new program.
The program will offer college students a strong support system to encourage recovery, including different resources of help, from Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings to seminars on relapse prevention. They will also host meetings to help students develop time management and study skills to reinforce academic success, focus and productivity.
Misch said that colleges are not generally considered environments that are conducive to recovery.”The American college campus, in general, is awash with alcohol and drugs. So it’s one thing to get treatment,” Misch said. “It’s another thing to reintegrate into the real world. And the university is the real world. . . After all, kids who are recovering from substance abuse are going to have to deal with other kids who are continuing to abuse substances. How are you going to manage that in your life?”
The program stresses the importance of associating recovering addicts with a new, positive environment. “Data shows that a key variable in the recovery process is changing friends to non-substance abusers,” Misch said. “This program will provide a valuable sense of community that shares values of sobriety.”
The Recovery Campus Program at CU-Boulder was inspired by the Collegiate Recovery Community at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. “Texas Tech is the leader in providing help for college students who need recovery support,” Misch said.
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