By Chloe ReichelOriginal Source: journalistsresource.org

Are workplace recovery programs successful in helping people to quit abusing drugs and avoid relapsing? A growing field of research suggests the answer is yes, though their success may have more to do with incentives than the nature of work itself.

There are a few ways that scholars have studied the relationship between employment and recovery, according to Matthew Walton, an instructor at the University of Louisville’s Kent School of Social Work. He is also the author of “The Effects of Employment Interventions on Addiction Treatment Outcomes: A Review of the Literature,” which looks at 12 studies on workplace recovery programs and concludes that they tend to be effective.

Walton described the two dominant approaches: one views employment as benchmark of successful recovery. The other area of research focuses on whether being employed is a therapeutic intervention in and of itself.

Paid work as an incentive to abstinence

Kenneth Silverman, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, is a leading researcher in this latter field. Silverman has developed an experimental therapeutic workplace that offers ...click here to continue reading