Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) Recovery Outcome Rates Contemporary Myth and Misinterpretation
January 1, 2008
This paper is written for AA members and is intended for internal and public circulation as an item of AA historical and archival research. It is offered to help inform the AA membership and academic researchers of a widely circulated misinterpretation and mischaracterization of AA recovery outcomes.
The fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, as a matter of long established principle, policy and practice, does not engage in public debate and seeks to avoid public controversy. The authors of this paper must emphasize that we do not speak for AA. We have a personal interest in the history of AA and consider it imperative to correct historical inaccuracies and propagation of myth.
Arthur S, Arlington, TX,
Tom E, Wappingers Falls, NY
Glenn C, South Bend, IN
. . . . . .
This paper addresses an erroneous myth that AA is experiencing a 5% (or less) “success rate” today as opposed to either a 50%, 70%, 75%, 80% or 93% (take your pick) “success rate” it once reputedly enjoyed in the 1940s and 1950s. The term “myth” is used to emphasize that the low “success rates” promulgated are a product of imagination, invention and inattention to detail rather than fact-based research.
Also noteworthy in the derivation of the mythical percentages, is the absence of fundamental academic disciplines of methodical research, corroborating verification and factual citation of sources. Regrettably, some of the advocates who are propagating the myth are AA members who purport to be “AA Historians” and appear to be advocating agendas that portray fiction as fact and hearsay as history.
. . . . . . .
Discussion, examination and analysis of the topic of AA recovery outcome rates are divided in this paper into two categories of investigation and reporting:
1. The first category concerns the examination of the contemporary (and quite erroneous) assertion that AA is only achieving a 5% or less success rate. The appalling success rate assertion is false but a segment of AA members not only readily believes it but also attempts to exploit it to support personal agendas. They propagate revisionist AA history and manufacture exaggerated claims of a superior early AA recovery program.
2. The second category concerns the examination of a popular and much repeated notion in AA of a 50% immediate success rate with about half (or 25%) of the “slippers” returning to successful recovery to produce an overall 75% success rate. This has been the prevailing “best estimate” of AA’s recovery outcomes since the late 1930s. It is denoted in this paper as a “50% + 25%” success rate (for a 75% total success rate).
. . . . . .
Download Full Report (PDF) _____________________________________________________________
