I found this in an article that was written from an interview with the authors.
Aside from family members of addicts | alcoholics or substance abusers, who else would benefit from reading your book?
We would love to see more of a shift in the conversation at large with respect to substance abuse and substance abuse treatment. That means not only with consumers of treatment but in our culture overall, with medical and other helping professionals, and within our own field of substance abuse treatment providers. It wasn’t so long ago that knowledge about substance abuse was not even a requirement at a doctoral level of therapy training, for instance, and many mental health professionals know very little about substance abuse. The conversation about substance abuse needs to change to include more acceptance of different pathways to change, more compassion for family members and those struggling with substance abuse problems, and less rigidity that enforces stigma and shame for those in most need of empathy and encouragement. So we’d be happy if more health professionals overall read this book and were inspired to learn more about evidence-based treatments and ways to help their patients who may have only the beginnings of substance use issues, so our culture is more geared toward true prevention and decreasing barriers of stigma so access to help is expanded.
There are ideological debates within our culture and within the professional world of treatment as well that also get in the way of people getting help: factions of harm reduction versus abstinence-based treatment, medication assistance versus none, and using AA or not. These debates obscure the fact that individual differences actually matter a great deal. Medication will work for some people but not others, same with AA. If someone decides against medication or against AA, we need to stop blaming the consumer for this decision (“they’re not ready” or “they’re in denial”) and instead question the rigidity of the prescription. Offering options is a motivational mainstay, clearly backed by research showing that motivation is increased when people feel they are choosing among reasonable options.
You can find information on the Smart Recovery site.
Self Help Addiction Recovery | SMART RecoveryŽ
There is also a book for Rational Recovery called The New Cure for Substance Addiction. You can find it on Amazon.com