SMART Recovery

SMART Recovery are a charity that support people recovering from addiction. They work with treatment providers around the UK as well as prisons, rehab facilities, probation, the NHS, and supported housing services. They hold peer-led meetings which help people to keep up with their recovery progress. These meetings take place both online and in-person. You can search for meetings near you by entering your address into the search function on their website.

Their focus is on empowering people to help themselves. Some of their key principles are:

People make a choice to engage in addictive behaviours and can make a choice to stop.
Everyone has the power of choice and can choose to change unhelpful or harmful behaviours.
People are not their behaviours, so stigmatising language like ‘addict’ and ‘alcoholic’ is not used.
People seeking recovery are empowered to choose what works best for them from a ‘tool box’ of methods demonstrated in meetings and also available online and in manuals.
Participants are free to engage with any other services or mutual-aid groups which they find helpful; there is no one path to recovery.
Once a healthy, positive, and balanced lifestyle is achieved participants are free to move on and pursue other goals in life. Some may choose to volunteer and train to become Meeting Facilitators.

They also have a 4-point programme for people recovering from addiction. The 4 points are: