From telephone calls to a device

In 1990 we began working with an outpatient, group and family model of treatment for the rehabilitation of drug addiction. Our institution is an NGO which takes in a population of sixty people at most, drawn from a non-marginalised, middle-class stratum. This limited number of people in treatment allows us to carry out the systematic follow-up I am going to describe here.

After a few years of work, we began to receive telephone calls and, at times, informal visits from parents whose children had completed their recovery process with us. These contacts came about thanks to the affective bond we had built together and which attached them to our institution.

Very often these parents were moved by nothing more than the wish to tell us how well they were living through this stage. On other occasions we recognised in the tone of their voice concerns about certain behaviours of their children, in which we could read a situation of alarm: behaviours that spoke of risk, and the fear of a relapse. The situation that then arose led us to organise a far more systematic form of contact.

With one of the groups that completed its process in 1994, we met once or twice in the course of the year, at our invitation, in order to replace the “chance” telephone calls. In this way the institution and the families shared this stage together.

The parents of the four families in this group of young people took part in those first meetings; the experience made us want to organise a new meeting, this time bringing together the parents of children who had completed their process in different groups. It was very interesting, for everyone, to be able to listen to and share the various vicissitudes these families were going through, in connection with their child’s recovery or with the risks that life might present to them.

The rhythm and the form of the meetings

Since 1995 we have undertaken a series of meetings which we have called “Follow-up” and which, tested by experience, have taken the following form: from the end of the recovery process onwards, we meet once a month during the first six months; then every two or three months depending on the configuration of the group; then every six months; and finally once a year.

These meetings are now scheduled with the participation of the young people, in multifamily groups, and are led by one of the two people who direct the institution, whose bond with these families was established as early as the “admission” interviews.

We are currently carrying out the follow-up with thirty-three groups of families. Each group is at a different moment of its development. We share with them the different life experiences each family goes through after the end of its recovery process.

The convening is multifamily, because our gaze is not confined to the young person’s process alone: it also bears on the modification of their context.

Each group is given a name, which arises out of its history, its contents and the particular features of its process. Humour, too, is present in that name. There is thus a group we have christened “Wonder”, another “Miracle”, another “Depth”, another “Emotion”, “Spring”, “Christmas”, and so on.

As soon as the family is included in the recovery process, intrafamily bonds take on a very particular weight. The first stage outside the institution is marked by the construction of a new hierarchical organisation and a new distribution of family functions, the family now being freed from the crisis in which it has lived through these long recent years.

It is natural that it should be the young people who, setting in motion all the new projects worked out during the treatment, make the first attempts at autonomy…