What the science actually says about relapse and recovery
When someone has relapsed, there is often a particular look in other people’s eyes: a small tightening around them and the quiet drawing of conclusions that everyone saw this coming. It is an old reflex many have. It’s also almost always wrong.
Watch how problem-solving courts work, here and around the world, and one thing becomes clear: the ordinary instinct to write someone off clashes with what the evidence shows about recovery.
What Relapse Tells Us
Relapse is often seen as a failure of a person or of the treatment process, but when researchers have really looked at this, the picture is more complicated. In fact, some researchers put addiction relapse rates for substance use as high as 60%. The number sounds high, but compared to other medical conditions, it really isn’t. Relapse rates for type 1 diabetes run 30 to 50 percent. For hypertension and asthma, they sit between 50 and 70 percent. Nobody says a person with asthma “failed” when they have another attack. Nobody suggests we stop treating high blood pressure because the patient went back to salt. We adjust the plan and we keep going, because we understand these as chronic conditions that flare.
This reframing matters because instead of viewing relapse as a moral failure, we need to understand it as part of the recovery process, at least for some people. It reflects a brain chemistry issue, not a character flaw. As Patrick Kennedy has said, mental illness should be “perceived and treated as issues of chemistry, not issues of character.” The difference between these two understandings is often the difference between sending someone to a jail cell and a clinic.
Most People Get Better
What is more, if you follow a case long enough, you find that most people living with addiction make it out with enough time and resources. In 2020, researchers led by Christopher Jones published a national study through the CDC and NIDA. They found that roughly one in ten American adults, about 27.5 million people, said they had once had a serious problem with alcohol or drugs. Of those, nearly 75 percent — some 20.5 million people — considered themselves recovered or in recovery. Three out of four. These numbers show that people recover, and at rates that embarrass our low expectations. Many of them come to recovery and healing with nothing else but time, support, and people, or even sometimes a single person in their circle who refused to give up on them.
Empathy With a Spine
This same recovery science is what problem-solving courts are built to act on. We don’t want to turn people into statistics, because the whole point of problem-solving courts is exactly the opposite. Rather, it is to see the whole person and meet them where they are, to serve and help them on their path to recovery and healing. The statistics are helpful, though, because every one of these figures represents a person who at some point had the kind of case the system was tempted to give up on. The value of this evidence is that it shows these newer models of justice, rooted in empathy and healing, working better than older notions of punishment.
Empathy is not the soft option. The scientific data points to the power of treatment, in changing people’s lives and the communities around them. Give people time, expect setbacks along the way, and keep the door open, and communities change. This process is not always overnight, but the evidence shows that it does work.
This is the case for the second chance, and as far as we can tell, the evidence has been trying to make it all along. So whether you work in the justice system, an adjacent field, or something else entirely, we hope that today you will remember the power of forgiveness. Forgiveness is not only a platitude. Lived out, it can bring healing to yourself, to others, and even to the world. We believe this holds true for both our judicial system and our lives.
If you or someone you know needs to talk to someone right now, call, text, or chat 988 for a free, confidential conversation with a trained counselor, available 24/7.
