Faith-Based Treatment for Substance Addiction in Hong Kong: A Naturalistic Treatment Outcome Study

Description

Substance addiction is described as a ‘chronic relapsing disease’, to which the Hong Kong government takes an ‘enlightened prohibition’ approach, emphasising the provision of rehabilitative support to addicts instead of imposing stringent legal sanctions (Cheung, 2009). The treatment and rehabilitation of substance addicts is thus of utmost importance. Various addiction treatment services are run by both the government and local NGOs, e.g. Christian therapeutic organisations. Apparently, ‘secular-based’ and ‘faith-based’ interventions are the two main treatment approaches for patients with addiction, representing very different sets of assumptions and strategies. Faith-based treatment uses the Christian theory of substance addiction, which recognises not only the psychological, social and physical determinants of addiction, but also the importance of the religious/spiritual dimension of abusing substance (Lyons et al., 2013). Despite the desirable treatment outcomes of faith-based treatment found in the West, which have a Christian origin and hold to a Christian theory of substance abuse such as 12-step treatment programmes, little research has been performed on their effectiveness anddelivery mechanisms, particularly in non-Western contexts like Hong Kong. Although some scholars regard the salutary outcomes of faith-based treatment to be the result of a ‘spiritual awakening’, drug addicts’ abstinence arises in fact from the re-establishment of healthy, wholesome life circumstances. In other words, faith-based treatment triggers changes in patients’ religiosity (e.g., growth in religiosity/spirituality), cognitive processes (e.g., increase in meaning and purpose in life), psychological status (e.g., lessened depression and enhanced self-efficacy) and social environment (e.g., strengthened family support and pro-abstinent peer network).These changes lead to patients’ recovery from substance abuse (Kelly et al., 2013; Krentzman et al., 2012; Lyons et al., 2011). Nevertheless, we know very little about how these multiple factors simultaneously and longitudinally contribute to treatment outcomes in natural treatment settings.The proposed study project will investigate the mechanisms by which faith-based addiction treatment delivers desirable outcomes and, in particular, the religious, cognitive, psychological and social factors in interplay leading to abstinent outcomes. This is a naturalistic treatment outcome study using a 4-wave prospective design, in which participants’ information will be collected at treatment intake, discharge from treatment and 6 and 12 months post-treatment, covering a 2-year time span. Addict patients in faith-based and secular-based treatments are the study participants while the latter serves as a comparative purpose. Time-lagged mixed-effect and lagged-effect multiple-mediational modelling will be used to offset the problems found in prior studies on addiction, such as the confusion of fixed and random effects, as well as the neglect of clustered nature of longitudinal data and the interactions of multiple predictors concomitantly in relation to the treatment outcomes. The findings of this study will contribute 1) theoretically, to our enhanced comprehension of faith-based treatment in a comparative fashion; 2) practically, offering insights for policy making and resource allocation for improved service; 3) internationally, as a reference for future cross-cultural or comparative research about addiction treatment; 4) locally, offering advice for practitioners to enhance treatment efficiency, and also as a long-term reference for indigenous addiction research.