Measuring success in the treatment of addiction is rather more difficult than it may seem. While many treatment centers will claim a certain level of success, typically quoting a percentage of clients for whom the treatment has ‘worked’, the reality is that success means different things to different people.

Ledgehill, like many other leading treatment centers, promotes complete abstinence from substance abuse and compulsive behaviour and so we regard abstinence over time as being our measure of success. When an addicted person becomes abstinent, they are not ‘cured’; they are successful as long as they do not return to their previous behaviour. This is why measuring success in addiction is notoriously difficult, because to truly get an objective measure of success one would have to monitor the progress of all clients for the rest of their lives.

However, we can get some idea of our level of success from the progress our clients reported when they came back for a weekend workshop. The workshop attracted clients who had attended core treatment programs during the last 6 months of 2009. 66% of the clients we treated during that period attended the workshop and were still abstinent. Of the 34% who did not attend, this was for a combination of reasons including travelling difficulties and personal difficulties in attending. We are aware of one client who did not attend because of relapse. There might, or might not, have been others.

We therefore feel confident that our ‘success rate’ is in excess of 70%.

Perhaps more important is the experiences that our clients report to us after leaving treatment, and for us this is one of the joys of running the Moving Beyond Recovery workshops. Our clients tell us that following core treatment, they have greater self awareness, improved relationships (especially with their families), and that they feel personal fulfillment. All of these are true indicators of success.