One of Scotland’s most influential experts on rehab has told how his own battle with addiction inspired him to help others to recovery. Dr David McCartney recently marked 20 years of sobriety after falling into alcoholism as a GP in Edinburgh.
He faced a mountain to climb to put the addiction behind him and get his mind and body back on track, with residential rehab a key building block of his recovery.
Dr McCartney used his own trauma as a vital tool in helping others, completing for a Masters degree in alcohol and drug studies before forming the Lothians and Edinburgh Abstinence Programme (LEAP), Scotland’s only NHS therapeutic community rehabilitation centre.
The doctor announced details of a groundbreaking 'peer bridger programme' - which has just recruited six workers to help steer people out of their addiction with intensive support before, during and after rehab.
Dr McCartney, 63, acknowledges how it was relatively easy it was for him, as a well-off GP in 2003, to seek help compared to the clients he sees coming through LEAP.
He said: “I feel inspired on a daily basis and I do identify with the struggles people have. I feel very much that people with experience of addiction have a lot to bring to the field, in terms of credibility and knowledge and we hope to see very good results.
“A lot of our patients don’t have the kind of resources I had when I went to treatment, which was very open to me as a GP. So I really do feel their achievement seems much, much greater, although I’m not diminishing what I’ve been through.”
Dr McCartney his own rehab was hugely impactful but, despite having been a doctor and trying to support people with addiction, he realised he knew very little about the physical and social pricesses that lead to and sustain addiction.
He said: “This realisation, given my experience, led to going back to do some further education and the setting up of LEAP. During my time in treatment I spoke to another doctor who was in recovery.
“And that gave me hope. I thought I didn’t see any way forward at that point. So this in a sense, the peer bridging programmes mirrors that experience.”
Dr McCartney acknowledges that recovery is usually a “bumpy road”, which he hopes his team of peer bridgers can help smooth out. He said: “Acknowledging that if someone uses drugs or alcohol after rehab is not a disaster, it’s part of that bumpy road and the peer bridgers know this all too well.
“The key thing is helping people them get to where they want to be. And that can involve other treatments, possibly methadone or other medically assisted treatments. The key thing is keeping people safe.”
Dr McCartney co-authored a recent study with Dr Nina Mackenzie on the four-year outcomes from residential rehab at LEAP. The findings massively supported the benefits of the 12-week programmes.
Dr MacKenzie said: “We found that there was improvements in physical health, in lessened substance use, in mental health and in quality of life outcome measures at four years - and also in rates of abstinence.
“So, four years after leaving residential rehab 48% of the cohort to people that we followed up, were abstinent at four years.
“We also found that those who completed the full programme had even better outcomes, with almost 61 per cent of those were abstinent at four years.
“That’s adding to the evidence that a period of Residential Rehabilitation can lead to improvements as long as four years after discharge.”
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