This is especially intrusting because Vaillant is a board member of Alcoholics Anonymous' General Service Board! (A fraction of AA board seats are reserved for non-members. Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA agent who overthrew Mossadegh, was for many years the treasurer for AA. Alcoholics were not trusted to serve in this role. ) Vaillant is frequently quoted by the media but I have never seen him identified as an official of AA in those interviews.
Stanton Peele has accused Vaillant of cooking his figures.
Martin Seligman (author of Learned Optimism) writes "it is little short of a scandal that the therapies for alcoholism that patients have had for decades--inpatient hospitalization, aversion, and AA--do not have large-scale, random-assignment, controlled studies to document their alleged effectiveness. This is particularly scandalous when there is so much precedent for showing that in this area, controlled studies usually suggest that treatment does not improve on the natural rate of recovery." (What You Can Change and What You Can't" p. 295)
Several of these studies are discussed in a chapter in Stanton Peele and Charles Bufe RESISTING 12-STEP COERCION: How to Fight Forced Participation in AA, NA or 12-Step Treatment.
Bufe's See-Sharp Press (http://www.seesharppress.com/) publishes books on anarchism as well as anti-AA.
Stuart Elliott
>
> I'm still catching up, but is there any evidence that AA is
> effective? Is anything more effective than the passage of time?
>
> Doug
>
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