Inkspots and ice cream cones: a model of recovery contagion and growth

Abstract

The model of recovery is based on an individualized and personalized journey of change and growth that is recognized both to be socially supported and mediated and to be contextually bound in terms of community resources and assets (as well as barriers and challenges in the local community). Specificity and precision has been added to recovery models by the emerging concept of ‘recovery capital’ creating not only the potential for a recovery metric but also the opportunity to assess changes in three key components of recovery capital (personal, social and community) and how they influence and shape each other. The paper builds on this by suggesting that not only can recovery capital have a residual impact on the community but that our understanding of this approach can be significantly enhanced with reference to John Braithwaite’s model of macro-criminology and in particular the concept of ink spots to explain spread. The paper integrates the contagion ideas of recovery with the cascade effects Braithwaite describes to explain crime reductions and concludes with a discussion of the potential of concepts like collective efficacy and social contagion to be used to supplement public health approaches to the implementation of recovery-oriented interventions at a systems level. While there has been a huge growth in the ‘evidence base’ around recovery in recent years, there remain two primary gaps that this paper attempts to address. The first is around the paucity of conceptual frameworks and models for recovery and the second is around recovery as a social and community phenomenon. In this paper, we build on previous work by the authors and supplement it with inter-disciplinary work around a ‘big picture’ model of recovery communities and recovery spread.