Author: Charles Frank

The science of recovery capital: Where do we go from here? PMC

These RCOs and recovery leaders represent a core component of the community recovery landscape and their role represents a type of RC that can be separated from the social RC of immediate personal relationships. And includes environmental factors that will increase the predictive power of RC measures. As outlined above, one of the key challenges for a RC science will be measuring community RC as available and accessible resources in a community and how that impacts on individual choices and pathways.

Authors have noted the difficulty in disentangling whether a resource (or barrier) is a result of structural or community-level factors or more individual processes (34) and how these may play out across time. For example, engagement in sports may lead to improvements across many domains at varying paces. That is, sports engagement could lead to developing personal RC (through wellbeing, fitness, self-esteem (35)), social RC through new friendship networks, and community RC through active engagement with resources in the community (leisure centres, community groups). In these situations, there is a lack of understanding of how to capture these differential influences, i.e., how each contributes in part to the whole of developing RC.

He recognized the importance of remaining abstinent, as relapsing could result in “losing everything”. Coping with his addiction was crucial for patient 2, and he also emphasized the importance of working through his past, including the death of his father and his feelings of low self-esteem. In addition, the patient recognized the significance of accepting his learning disability and taking responsibility for his actions.

Within this context, it is particularly interesting that two patients tended to prioritize obtaining human RC, despite also experiencing severe challenges in most other domains. A study on NRC by Gavriel-Fried and Lev-El [10] in individuals with a gambling disorder yielded similar tendencies, potentially indicating high levels of awareness of a patient’s own role in their addiction. However, the authors cautioned that prioritizing human RC could also indicate a perception of addiction recovery as an individual responsibility rather than a shared societal one. Various institutions and organizations enabled patients to receive professional guidance, treatment, and access to assisted and sheltered housing. However, the transition between different treatment settings, including the shift from inpatient to outpatient care or from a clinic to sheltered or assisted housing, did not always occur smoothly.

However, he faced challenges accessing the desired aftercare and expressed that he missed the supportive structure of the clinic. Additionally, his living environment was fraught with drug dealers, and, although his financial situation was stable, he was ineligible for new housing. Initially at risk of relapse due to boredom, patient 2 managed to maintain abstinence by staying engaged in activities, such as attending to household chores and increasing his working hours.

Capital recovery refers to the process of recouping the initial investment made in a project or investment. It represents the return of the capital invested and is achieved through the generation of cash flows over time. The speed of capital recovery is influenced by factors such as the size of the initial investment, the rate of return, and the consistency and magnitude of the cash flows. In smaller contexts, capital recovery may also relate to the business practice of attempting to gather funds owed to a company. Six months after completing treatment, the patient achieved complete abstinence, successfully resumed employment, and anticipated the arrival of his second child.

For Current Students

Every type of recovery capital has varying benefits that it can offer for an individual’s recovery. For example, having a reliable form of transportation (personal capital) can be an advantage, as it can get an individual to and from an outpatient addiction treatment program. To find out how to access local community support, you can search our list of recovery community organizations. Please visit our blog outlining an extensive list of  pathways of recovery that include social and peer-based resources, cultural and faith-based supports, and clinical treatment information. One major issue requiring further conceptual development is the lack of clarity on how RC domains are distinct but interrelated entities.

1. Alternatively, they can be interpreted as an expression of what Treloar and Holt [24] coined the “deficit model”, in which those seeking SUD treatment are mostly described as “problems to be solved”.
2. Consequently, he was relocated to an assisted living facility with less strict drug policies.
3. This latest version of the Recovery Capital Model leverages the current research and findings that go beyond the original elements defined in the earlier fifty question Assessment of Recovery Capital (ARC) and its condensed version, the Brief Assessment of Recovery Capital (BARC).
4. To date the most widely used are the 50-item Assessment of Recovery Capital (ARC; (27)) and its briefer (10-item) version (BARC;(28)), both of which have been used in a range of recovery support settings and across different populations.
5. When consider costs and returns, the United States Department of Agriculture commonly cites capital recovery.

This study (1) describes recovery capital, (2) examines the relationship between recovery capital and treatment duration, and (3) assesses differences by gender in recovery capital among people receiving medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD). Scoring RC measures remains an issue because current scales assume all RC should be equally weighted and that a summative score best represents the combination of resources held by an individual. Yet, it seems likely that some RC is more important to have than other forms of RC; that is, some RC is likely more important because it provides the link to greater resources or stability important to the person.

When a company earns net income, it may either make payments to investors (i.e. dividends) or invest funds internally for growth. Capital recovery typically represents the return of your initially invested capital over the lifespan of an investment. At the initial point of investment, it is impossible to determine what the true return on the investment will be.

Availability of data and materials

Put simply, recovery capital can help sustain recovery and reduce the risks of returning to use by increasing a person’s support system. Recovery capital can determine the success of natural and assisted recovery, improve coping strategies and enhance the quality of life in long-term recovery, and end addiction careers. We must be mindful of increasing resources to marginalized communities when addressing recovery capital. Some have conceptualized it as solely positive (resource-driven) and thus on a summative scale while Cloud and Granfield (5) and others, suggest a continuum with the presence of negative RC. From a purely etymological perspective, “recovery barriers” rather than “negative recovery capital” would be a more appropriate term to use; capital according to the Oxford Dictionary is defined as “wealth in the form of money or other assets owned by a person or organization”.

Thus, further qualitative research with specific populations seems necessary to delineate potential ranking or weighting of RC factors, as well as to disentangle how changes in some domains of RC may lead to changes in other domains. We can then build further conceptual frames and hypotheses which should be refined based on longitudinal and multi-method testing. A discussion of RC would not be complete without briefly describing its origins in addiction recovery.1 Addiction has been framed as a chronic, debilitating disease, with remission or recovery used to describe one’s healing from it.

However, recovery capital varied across recovery dimensions as well as by gender, and many participants experienced recent discrimination in a healthcare setting which can have a detrimental impact on recovery capital. Findings highlight areas for tailored treatment interventions to strengthen and cultivate recovery capital. Targeting recovery capital as an alternative person-centered treatment outcome to abstinence could serve as a beneficial harm reduction strategy and help promote recovery-based systems of care for people with OUD. In addition to differences across recovery dimensions, gender-based differences in recovery capital emerged within the health and purpose recovery dimensions highlighting the importance of incorporating gender-informed approaches in recovery capital measurement and intervention. Prior work among nontreatment seeking populations highlighted women having more compromised long-term recovery dimensions (i.e., quality of life and psychological distress) than men [16]. Conversely, the current study found women were more likely than men to report having more important things in their lives than substances, making good progress on their recovery journey, and taking responsibility for their actions.

What Are the Different Types of Recovery Capital?

Several factors influence the speed of capital recovery, including the size of the initial investment, the rate of return or profitability of the investment, and the consistency and magnitude of the cash flows generated. Additionally, factors such as inflation, operating expenses, and taxes can impact the speed of capital recovery. The investment is anticipated to provide a positive return and achieve capital recovery if the present value of the anticipated future cash flows is greater than the initial capital investment. The investment may not be adequate to recover the money, and it may not be a beneficial one, if the current value is lower than the initial investment.

Below, we first reflect on the (N)RC domains as they applied to our cases, after which the viability and merit of the model for this population are discussed. It is true that nearly anyone with SUD can benefit from professional treatment and aftercare. However, regardless of the severity of an individual’s SUD, if the individual has a high recovery capital, they may not require as many resources to obtain or maintain lasting sobriety. Recovery capital captures the full spectrum of resources that impact an individual’s recovery — from their family and friends, to their housing and finances, to their health and cultural traditions. Both approaches are patient-centered and focus on the external and internal forces that can impact one’s recovery. In this way, recovery capital teaches those suffering from alcohol or drug addiction what works for them and what doesn’t.

The patients’ case files mainly reported a history of human NRC, such as SUD, various mental health problems, mild-to-borderline intellectual disability (MBID), and a lack of healthy coping mechanisms. The patients themselves, however, did describe human RC factors, such as perceived coping skills and “feeling strong and sociable”. Interestingly, most patients tended to prioritize goals related to human RC, while also experiencing severe challenges in most other domains.