A good friend of mine is trying to make arrangements for me to visit a recovery center in Russia, called "Old World."
Here's from their English side of the main page:
We are very pleased to have the opportunity to tell you about our work. Although our Russian website www.stsv.org is not completely translated into English yet, we are hard at work on the translation, page by page, and hope to finish it soon. The pages that we have already translated have the word "English" at the bottom, so you can switch between Russian to English version easily with just a click. For some of the pages only the headlines are translated at the moment, so that you could have at least a brief overview of the page content. For now, we are only displaying a few select materials – articles, texts, presentations – describing our most important activities. Among the materials are PowerPoint presentations about the involvement of the Old World Christian Charity and Christian TC in addiction treatment, as well as an article Christian Therapeutic community.
The main goal of the Old World Christian Charity is to help unite the efforts of those people and organizations:
- who want to find a real solution for the alcohol/drug and HIV problems overwhelming our country;
- who are willing to help people suffering from the diseases, and their families, to start a new life, filled with faith and joy;
- who consider spiritual renewal as the main way to heal individual people and society as a whole, in order to cure this terminal illness.
Today alcoholism and drug addiction as well as related problems of AIDS/HIV, hepatitus, tuberculosis and other dangerouse diseases are becoming a social holocaust, ruining millions of families. We are confident that the main reasons for this tragic development are the spiritual deficiencies in individual people and society as a whole. Of course we do not neglect, but rather re-affirm and consider to be extremely important, the additional biological, psychological and social causes of these illnesses.
Therefore about twenty years ago, we founded this organization aimed at the creation of an integrated system of spiritually-oriented alcohol/drug addiction prevention and treatment, while at the same time developing Christian spirituality in people and restoring Christian values in society as a whole.
In our new website you can get find infornation about our work, other rehab programs, self-support groups, as well as useful books, articles and other materials about addiction and related issues. We hope to be able to present to present these materials in Russian, English and Polish languages in the near future.
I really hope I can make it over there to see what they are doing. based on what I've gotten from their website and the reports of my friend, they are implementing an effective treatment program in an Orthodox context. It will be interesting to see it first-hand, and I will (obviously) post more here as the story unfolds. One of the things I like about the program is that it involves clinical professionals and clergy working together. This is really very important in maintaining a spiritual program.
Notice also they are taking a larger vision of treatment, including AIDS. This is not unlike American facilities who use the 'dual diagnosis' method for identifying co-occurring disorders. This looks very promising.
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