CRIMINAL JUSTICE THERAPY: MELDING CARE WITH CONTROL

In theory the great advantage of treatment ordered by the criminal justice system is that it can ‘hold’ patients in treatment and get them to comply with the programme sufficiently to gain benefits. But what does the coercion which grips patients do to the quality of the contacts it enforces?

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The Demand for Alcohol in South Africa

The sale, dispensing and distribution of liquor was prohibited in the nationwide lockdown on levels 5 and 4 (DMA, 2002; Amendment Regulations 2020:22). The alcohol ban that was imposed during these levels highlighted the erratic behavior where looting of alcohol outlets in South Africa was observed (BusinessTech, April 2020). This behavior that was observed demonstrated that the demand for alcohol in South Africa is an ongoing problem (Peltzer, et al., 2011:36). The national disaster in which the fight against the novel virus COVID-19, became the...

ORGANISATIONS SET THE CONTEXT FOR CRIME-REDUCING TREATMENT

Key studies teasing out organisational-level influences on treatment for drinking problems which aims to reduce crime and safeguard family and community. In the context of a market which drives treatment organisations to expand, asks, “Is small beautiful?”, explores how supervision responsibilities might undermine therapy, and pursues the implications of transitioning to family- rather than patient-focused treatment.

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HOW CAN YOU PRIORITISE THE CHILD WHEN YOUR PATIENT IS THE PARENT?

Guidance insists child welfare is paramount, even if your client is not the child, but their parent. The temptation is to sideline this uncomfortable but important work, placing the onus on managers to counter this through training, support, monitoring and supervision. Place yourselves in their shoes; how you would reconcile prioritising child protection with targets and expectations related to their parents’ substance use?

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‘DANGEROUS DATA’ PART 1: WHY THE HEAT?

Each Monday over the next eight weeks we divide up the hot topic released last week on controlled drinking as a treatment goal and serve it to you in bite-size chunks. The series starts with part 1, “Why the heat?” on what the controversy was about and why chinks in the abstinence-only consensus aroused such passion.

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Findings is...

THE TRICKIER THE SITUATION, THE MORE THE WORKER MATTERS

Cell B5’s research-derived understandings of therapeutic work in a criminal justice or family protection context funnelled into the final section, tempting the formulation of a general rule: The greater the formal power a clinician/therapist/counsellor has over a patient’s life, the weaker their informal influence through therapy. Does it stand up to the ‘stress test’ of evidence, experience and logic?

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The report “Alcohol and the coronavirus pandemic: individual, societal and policy perspectives” is the latest research publication in the series “Alcohol and Society” that has been published since 2013 to annually collate the latest evidence about alcohol’s harm on people and society.

It is the hope that this report will help increase knowledge and awareness of alcohol-related risks in connection with both this and future pandemics, both in purely physical terms – in that alcohol weakens the immune system – as well as increased risk of the spread of infection, due to alcohol’s effect on human...