Addiction Exchange
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Volume 3, No. 5: Recovering College Students
April 3, 2001

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Welcome to Addiction Exchange, a forum for the exchange of clinical practice and research information among clinicians, scientists, educators, and administrators in the field of addiction. This issue on Recovering College Students is by guest author Kevin Doyle, Ph.D., in conjunction with National Alcohol Screening Day, April 5.

The recovering alcohol or drug addicted college student, who has often received and completed treatment while still in pursuit of his or her high school education, must face the challenge of continuing the difficult task of recovery while immersed in the world of drinking and drug use that is found on many campuses (Bratter, Parker, and Pierson, 1995); Bratter and Parker, 1994). Relatively innocuous situations such as social gatherings, fraternity or sorority events, intercollegiate athletic competitions, and dormitory living can become literally life-threatening situations for students in recovery; simple decisions such as identifying a potential roommate, choosing one's social group, or making leisure plans become vitally important. The needs of this group of students, however, are not always clear, nor are the lines of responsibility for addressing their needs on their college or university campus.

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 makes this responsibility clearer by extending the provisions of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (particularly Section 504) (Rothstein, 1991; Frank and Wade, 1993) and clarifying its applicability to recovering students (Jones, 1994). Protection under the ADA is specifically not granted to individuals who are currently engaging in the illegal use of substances, but rather to those who are either engaging in treatment or otherwise recovering (ADA, 1990). Such protection, which is to take the shape of "reasonable accommodation," is left to the discretion of the individual college or university through the designated staff persons.

To learn more about recovering college students and the services available to them, a national survey was conducted in order to assess both the frequency with which recovering students reveal themselves to college/university administrators and types of services offered to them (Doyle, 1999). Consisting of a stratified random sample of members of the Association of Higher Education and Disability, the survey produced a response rate of 63.4%

Of the 312 survey respondents, 85 respondents reported that no students had reported being in recovery in the previous two years, while 208 reported that one or more students had. The number of students reported by each respondent ranged from one to 125.

Likewise, survey respondents stated that recovering students do ask for accommodation, although not as frequently as they simply make their presence known. Of the 294 respondents who answered this question, 167 reported that no students had requested accommodation and 127 reported that at least one student had made such a request in the previous two academic years. Once again, the range of responses was from one to 125, with one being the modal response.

Taken together, then, the data suggest that recovering students are present on college campuses, that they do make themselves known, and that they do indeed request accommodation under the ADA.

Support services that are available for recovering students reflect a traditional array of services from a counseling/human services perspective. Respondents identified individual counseling (offered at 64.4% of their institutions), a treatment/referral list (50.6%), and on-campus twelve-step meetings (30.1%) as the three most available support services. An on-campus support group for recovering students, a substance-free housing option, and peer counseling were all identified by approximately one-fifth of the respondents as the next most frequent tier of support services.

Several items stand out as significant from the results of these questions. Although nearly two-thirds of the institutions report offering some individual counseling, only 18.9% offer substance-free housing. Recovering students, if choosing or required to live in college/university housing, would thus face an environment in which substances, most notably alcohol, might be available at best and prevalent at worst. Although 30.1% of the respondents indicated that AA/NA meetings are available on campus, the other 69.9% did not. Without meetings on campus, students are reliant on meetings available in the local community and must solve issues such as transportation and appropriateness (demographics of the particular group). While a case can certainly be made that the recovering student must use the personal responsibility emphasized by A.A., ideally any barriers to meeting attendance should be avoided or at least minimized. Community-based meetings might not help students make connections with other recovering students, hindering them in developing the "clean and sober" peer group that has been associated with successful recovery.

There was also a significantly greater mean number of services among those institutions from which the respondent reported an institutional belief that the ADA should cover recovering students, compared to those institutions from which respondents indicated that they did not know their institution's belief.

Once again, even institutions that were reported to believe that the ADA should not cover recovering students did not differ significantly in the number of services offered, suggesting that knowledge about the law encourages a degree of compliance, although not necessarily agreement with it. As with the respondents themselves, the institutions that offered significantly less services were those whose opinion on the applicability of the ADA to recovery was not apparent to the respondents.

The results of this survey suggest that colleges and universities should be both aware of recovering students and prepared to respond to requests for accommodation from them. Institutional policies relating to issues such as alcohol and other drug use, use of campus facilities by outside groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, and disability staff expertise and training should be examined in light of the apparent prevalence of recovering students on campus.

Second, the services provided to recovering students appear to be diverse and evolving. Services such as individual counseling, on-campus Twelve-Step meetings, a recovery group, and a treatment/referral list seem to be most common, while other services are offered sporadically. There does not appear to be a consensus model of services that are the standard and widely available to this group of students.

Finally, institutions whose position on the ADA's applicability to recovering students is not clear to its staff may be less equipped to comply with ADA requirements, not only for recovering students, but by extension for other disabled students as well. The implication, then, is that colleges and universities need to be cognizant of ADA requirements and skilled in communicating not only these requirements but also the institutional philosophy about them to the affected staff members.

References

Doyle, K. (2000). The recovering college student: Factos Influencing accommodation and service provision.(Doctoral dissertation, University of Virginia, 1999). Dissertation Abstracts International, 60, no. 06A (1999): p. 1919.

Jones, N. (1994). "The alcohol and drug provisions of the ADA: Implications for employers and empoyees," in Implications of the Americans with Disabilities Act for Psychology. Bruyere, S.M. & O'Keefe, J. (eds.), New York: Springer.

Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, Public Law 101-336, Stat 327, 42 U.S.C. Section 1201 et seq.

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