TW: Sexual assault, suicide (ideation and attempt), addiction, alcohol and other drugs.  

In my final undergraduate year, an acquaintance who was seeking support for addiction issues told me she’d been advised by a recovery mentor to ditch her ambitions and not apply to go to university. ‘First things first,’ she had said. ‘My recovery is more important.’

I was stunned.

At that point in my life, more than three decades ago now, my own addiction problems were beginning to take hold. However, it would be more than ten years before I would acknowledge that. I had, at that time, little understanding of addiction, and no understanding at all of recovery. I considered the advice my friend had received to be utterly outrageous. Surely, a university education should be available to anyone in possession of the admission requirements! I objected, viscerally, to this person being figured as ‘too fragile’ for education. I considered the aspiration for education to be, not only a good, but a right. My own university education meant the absolute world to me. How dare some ‘non-university-educated’ person, (I assumed, on no basis at whatsoever), limit my friend’s reasonable ambition!

I can now see that my anger was driven mostly by unconscious self-protection. Here I was enjoying the privileges of education, and yet our lifestyles were so similar. The only difference was that, unlike my friend, I hadn’t emerged from denial sufficiently even to recognise I had a problem, let alone to begin the excruciating process of getting honest about it. My anger was an expression of the painful dissonance between my surface-level ignorance and naivety about addiction, and a much deeper and inexpressible fear and loathing. I was only dimly conscious of my hatred for my daily behaviour and for my genetic vulnerability, and of the terror that came with the violent strength of my desire for oblivion. These were all dark emotions on which I absolutely had to keep a firm lid.

Acknowledging my idealism

My anger also represented a certain naivety about academia. I had tasted some of the challenges faced by many first-in-family undergraduates. I was anxious that I wasn’t clever enough and I was exhausted by the day-to-day grind of poverty. But I hadn’t yet realised the full toxicity of academic life — its assessments, judgements, obstacles, failures, critiques, institutional dysfunction, fragile egos, narcissism and personal rivalries.

At the time of the conversation with my friend, I romanticised and idealised my education, and I strongly believed that the privilege should be extended to her. This was not because I was especially generous and principled. Rather, though I wouldn’t have couched it in these terms then, it was because the right to university education had to be extended to her, or else it would signify that I, as a person like her, may not be entitled either.

When I look back at that self-involved anger three decades on, I ask myself, ‘Now that I know what I know about addiction, and about academia, do I still think the recovery mentor advised my friend wrongly?’ In general terms, yes, I do; though with some qualifications. Obviously, it is unwise to legislate for all cases. Perhaps there was a specific reason, of which my opinionated twenty-year-old self was wholly unaware, why going to university would not have been in the interest of this person’s recovery. Furthermore, I have learned, through bitter first-hand experience, the deep wisdom embedded in irritating recovery slogans like ‘first things first.’ Today, I have a much better grasp of the enormous challenges of maintaining a recovery from a very serious addiction while simultaneously trying to function in the context of the often toxic, neoliberal university. Nevertheless, I’m still profoundly convinced that education is supportive of recovery. It can feed wider flourishing and empowerment in ways that make it potentially liberative just as Paolo Freire and bell hooks envisioned. But it’s not just about what education can do for recovering people, nor even the contingent benefits to wider society of recovery support. I’m also convinced that people with addiction histories, just like people living with other mental health challenges, have something truly distinctive and valuable to offer to that collective project of liberative education. They bring deep life experience, extremely hard-won personal assets and extraordinary community-building potential. These should all be acknowledged, fostered and celebrated within the university community, not only, and not even principally, for the sake of the recovering person, but for the sake of the university.  

To speak or not to speak?

The Voices of Academia project is committed to bringing first-person narratives and lived-experience expertise into the discussion about mental health in the academy. I wholeheartedly support that endeavour, and therefore feel a sense of obligation to tell at least some of my own story. Although I have told parts of it before, I do want to acknowledge the feelings of resistance that come with speaking in the first person. Those feelings of resistance, for me, take the form of questions. ‘What will people think?’ ‘Will they think that I’m attention-seeking?’ ‘Will they think I’m trying to re-purpose, for personal benefit, the damage I caused in my past?’ ‘Will they think I’m using my connection to communities of recovery and to other people’s suffering in order to give me a platform on which to advance my own career?’ From a slightly different but equally uncomfortable direction, I find myself asking, ‘I’m not a clinical expert in addiction or recovery, what right do I have to spout my personal opinions?’ This is a loop I go round frequently. Of course, my right to speak is based in my own lived experience, but, that said, telling a story is never a simple matter.  

On speaking

My story, like all stories, is not just about one person. Others are enmeshed; namely, the victims of harm I perpetrated, those who perpetrated harm on me, and bystanders. Their stories are definitely not mine. I have to take care, as far as is possible, to avoid telling their stories, and indeed to recognise that I don’t really even know their stories, not in full. However, the themes, meanings and deeper truths of my story are mine alone to narrate. They are not only for me to narrate, but for me to explore and re-narrate as my life moves forward, and my perspective, accountability, and therefore my healing, hopefully, grow and deepen. My motivation for relating my story is to make a single, specific and personal contribution to a wider conversation about healing. Individual stories can contribute to healing, but discourses of healing require multiple lived-experience voices (including allies and family members), multiple professional voices from a range of backgrounds; clinicians, therapists, third-sector specialists, and, I would argue, ethnographers and other academics from the arts, humanities and social sciences. A single voice can only offer one story or perspective. However, it’s no less valuable for that.   

I am aware not only of my ‘right’ to speak, but also of my responsibility to do so. This responsibility is a function of my privilege. I’ve (thankfully) been in abstinent and reasonably stable recovery for 18 years. Recovery is never ‘complete’ and I’m always at risk of relapse, but long experience with dealing with challenging emotions tells me that so long as I take necessary actions, getting some judgement, criticism or even nastiness, is not going to immediately send me back to the bottle. This feeling of safety has been hard-won. But I also appreciate it as a privilege. Furthermore, I am in a permanent academic post. The permanence of my post may not mean a great deal these days, but I’m significantly more secure than someone on a zero-hours or temporary contract. At this point, two decades on, very little that I could say about my past could arm the system against me. My close colleagues all know my background, respect me and anticipate my needs. I’m unlikely to face peer-pressure, moral judgement, or stigma in my day-to-day working environment. My protection from these assaults might be partly to do with the moral qualities of my colleagues, but it is also because these days, for the most part, although the consequences of addiction still reverberate in my life and the lives of those I harmed, they do not reverberate loudly enough for people outside of my most intimate circles to hear them. As a result, I have very little to lose from telling my story, apart from the mild risk of being considered attention-seeking. However, because of stigma, those with less privilege cannot speak as I can.

For someone much closer in time to their active addiction, to tell their story is far riskier. Recovery is so fragile, the slightest failure, or judgement –  even a pitying or superior glance –  can wobble someone enough to put their abstinence or control in jeopardy. The lives of people in early recovery are usually desperately difficult because of the chaos of their unravelling situations and relationships. They might be trying to hold it together at work while their home life is in smithereens. They might be trying to hold their head up and behave professionally, knowing they have made mistakes, under-performed, let-down or hurt their colleagues, or worse. The professional world of contemporary academia is particularly inhospitable to those in recovery. Metrics such as the NSS and REF mean there is little space for ‘passengers’ in an academic unit, and that can take an awful toll, especially when one of the most significant drivers of addiction is shame. The first years of a recovery journey are very hard. For early career academics, or those in precarious employment, the brutal, critical and exploitative environment of academia can only make things worse.

Medicating trauma and the Protestant work ethic

So, my story. Two decades ago, my life disintegrated. At the time, I was working at another university, not my current place of employment. Although I took other drugs, my main problem was alcohol. This problem developed young. I’d had a challenging upbringing and I’m a survivor of a rape that took place in my early 20s. These are not exceptional experiences. Like many others with these experiences, I medicated the trauma with alcohol, pretty successfully, for more than a decade. At the same time, I worked incredibly hard, got my PhD, and got an academic job. In the early part of my career, I functioned, even with my serious alcohol problem. But addiction is a progressive condition, and by the time I was in my early 30s, I was living alone in a mouldy caravan in a field, showering on campus and hiding alcohol in my office. I wasn’t eating and I was down to eight and a half stone. I was experiencing panic attacks, frequent suicidal ideation and I made some actual suicide attempts. My self-loathing had reached lethal proportions.

However, I was still turning up to work. The protestant work ethic ran so brutally strong in me, and university overwork culture meant the demands of the job were relentless. It was challenging, but I kept going. I was known by colleagues as a drinker, but I hid the extent of the problem. People didn’t know where or how I was living. It’s relatively easy to hide when you’re a young woman. I was congratulated on my weight loss, my rosy cheeks and my party attitude. I pushed myself so hard to do what was needed at work and to keep up the fiction that I was ‘fine’. But my relationships were disintegrating, my values were abandoning me and I was experiencing frequent blackouts. On one occasion, I chaired an entire academic symposium, but afterwards had no recollection of any of it. The next day a close colleague told me he thought I had seemed ‘seriously unwell’ and suggested that I ‘get some help.’ I can remember him saying that, but to this day I can’t remember anything about the symposium, who was there, how I performed, what happened, what, except in the most general terms, it was even about. After my friend called me out, I did seek help (and remain grateful to him to this day); but to engage constructively with that help took months, and, unfortunately, further dramatic deterioration.

Obstacles to recovery

There are significant reasons why it is so hard to get well. When you stop using a substance addictively, your body goes into revolt. It can be dangerous to stop without medical help. But even with that help, every cell aches, the brain plays tricks, and the mind screams that a drink or drug would stop this physical and mental pain. And of course, it would. Temporarily.

If you take the substance away, you are left with yourself, the person that in all probability you hate the most. There’s no escape. Nowhere to run. No anaesthetic. Ever. You have to sit there with all of the awful things you’ve done, the relationships you’ve wrecked, the people you’ve hurt; with crippling anxiety and paranoia, and life-threatening shame. It’s a truism that people with addictions almost always have underlying traumas. But it’s worse than that. The injury that goes along with addiction is not just physical or psychological. It is also a kind of moral injury – the unbearable knowledge of what you have personally perpetrated, laid down on the top of the underlying trauma that gave rise to the addiction in the first place. This moral injury leads to a cycle of deepening shame, one that undermines and frustrates any attempts at recovery. Social stigma, too, plays a powerful part in keeping this vicious cycle spinning. The person who has engaged in addictive behaviour to medicate trauma has to live, not only with what they’ve now done to hurt loved-ones, but with how they are perceived by society. Social stigma is powerful. It reflects back on the self, causing shame. And, if alcohol or other substance issues are involved, it is not too strong to say that shame kills.

The good news is that there are plenty of tried and tested ways of getting well from addiction. But one of the reasons that it is so hard, is that because of stigma, our culture doesn’t tell stories of recovery. We need recovery stories to be visible, but those who achieve recovery feel a pressure to just move on and keep their heads down. It’s hard to celebrate recovery publicly, because that requires the admission of vulnerability. We’ve gone some distance with undoing the stigma associated with certain mental health conditions, even if there is still a way to go. But the cultural assumption remains that people with addiction problems bring it upon themselves, that their behaviour is driven by choices freely made. Addiction is seen as a moral failure. Sufferers are seen as inseparable from their addiction, as irresponsible citizens and family members who lack love for those close to them.

Recovery and the University

Structural problems are deeply embedded in institutions, so it makes sense to me to situate and embed the solution to these problems also within institutions. One such institution is the university. In the UK, there is a new and burgeoning “Recovery-Friendly University” movement. At the point of writing, four universities have made some level of public commitment to people in recovery, the Universities of Birmingham, Sunderland, Teesside and my own. The movement, which is part of the wider Visible Recovery Movement, explicitly names and celebrates recovery as an intersection of identity. This is not how recovery is experienced or expressed universally, but for many people, recovery is as much a part of their identity as their gender or sexuality. Recovery is fundamental to their orientation to the world, and it becomes a site of pressure and challenge because of the way society is structured. The Visible Recovery Movement takes its inspiration from equalities activism past and present, especially the Pride movement. In seeking to make universities explicitly recovery-friendly, the hope is to create spaces in which people can tell and hear a multitude of stories of recovery. The aspiration is that a university would be a place where it would be easy, not only for someone like me, but for those without my career security and recovery duration, to publicly ‘come out’ as a person in recovery in the workplace.

So many people in recovery lost way more than I lost and yet they are still, courageously, trying to rebuild their lives. I’m lucky to be able to say that I didn’t end up with a criminal record. That was pure chance. When my drunken behaviour was at its most irresponsible, I did things that would have attracted a criminal record had I been caught. If I had ended up with a record, my career post-PhD may not have been open to me. I would most certainly have had an even greater battle with the nasty internal voice that tells me “You’re just a stupid drunk and don’t deserve to be here.” I don’t think I’d have been objectively less deserving than someone who scraped through their addiction without picking up a criminal record or jail time, but stigma would have made the practical and psychological consequences considerably more severe.  And they were already severe.

So far, I have been talking about academic staff. At my university, a weekly peer-support meeting for staff identifying as in recovery, or as having an addiction problem or history, both welcomes and profoundly benefits from the input of staff in all categories. However, the HE sector as a whole has a very long way to go to explicitly enable potential students with substance histories to access education, and to use education as a crucial part of rebuilding their lives. It would be great if universities opened their doors, told them they’re seen, welcomed and celebrated. It would be great if universities assured them that they’d find a pro-recovery atmosphere, supportive of their identity. I listen to the stories of the activists in the LGBTQ+, mental health and disability communities within universities who have undertaken this cultural change work over decades. I hear how very difficult this work is and understand how very early in the journey we are. I am definitely not arguing that people in recovery have a responsibility to talk about it or to ‘come out’. That call to action frames the marginalised community as responsible for dismantling the stigma that oppresses them, a responsibility that they must not be made to bear. I’m arguing instead that we all need to participate in building an environment that is welcoming to those in recovery, that works against stigma, and that provides spaces where those in recovery can thrive. Until people with problematic substance-use histories, including those with associated criminal justice experience, are as fully welcomed as those suffering with anxiety and depression, we are paying lip-service to the widening participation and equality of access agendas.

Recovery contagion

Research tells us that, like addiction, recovery is contagious. Unfortunately, late modern societies are so often beset by disconnection and loneliness, perfect environments for the isolating experience of addiction to flourish. The toxic elements of academia notwithstanding, a university as an institution is a naturally existing community. A naturally existing community offers a real and liberatively counter-cultural opportunity to leverage the positive community contagion of recovery. The aspiration for the Recovery-Friendly University is not only about equity, access and support. It’s about using our togetherness in university communities positively, not only to seed recovery inside higher education, but also to spread it outwards into wider society.

Dr Wendy Dossett is Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Chester, UK. She had to retire between writing this piece and its publication owing to suffering a heart attack. However, she continues to contribute to the study of addiction recovery in her Emeritus role. She’s Principal Investigator of the Higher Power Project, a large qualitative project exploring the language of religion, spirituality, and non-religion in addiction recovery. She has also written on the variety of Buddhist paradigms of recovery. She remains an advocate for Visible Recovery and grateful to be herself in recovery. Blog: wedossett.com. Twitter: @WEDossett @higherpowerproj

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