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Finding Rat Park

October 01 2024
The front cover of Finding Rat Park. © Steel Door Studios The front cover of Finding Rat Park. © Steel Door Studios

A new book on navigating the maze of addiction recovery releases in October. Here, the author discusses their experience in recovery, writing a book and explains what Rat Park means. By Denise Harrison

Being admitted to detox was never a goal of mine. I didn’t ever aspire to become an alcoholic. Those were the guys on benches and people in doorways, clutching their cheap cans of cider or extra strength lager. Not me. It was never, ever supposed to be me.

Only, it turns out that what I thought was irrelevant, because I became one anyway. My name is Denise and I have been in recovery since 2016.

I’m not a doctor, a scientist, or any kind of health professional. I’m not particularly religious and I don’t follow a 12-step programme. I’m just a person in recovery who’s been there, done that and puked on the T-shirt, who happens to know a few things about recovery and how to live a life free from addiction.

In 2014, after a really, truly, horrendous year, which saw me lose my relationship, my home, my pets and almost all of my possessions, I had a mental breakdown. I drank excessively to cope and over the next couple of years I spiralled into a skeletal, suicidal mess.

I was admitted into detox in November 2016, weighing barely six stone. My periods had stopped, my hair was falling out and my legs were so thin that they struggled to carry me. I was only 43, but I looked a lot older and felt about 90.
It was here, in this place, that I was finally able to take stock of the damage that addiction had done. Not only to me but to everyone around me, and I heard some truly horrendous stories of loss, loneliness, trauma and grief.

In total I spent four months in detox and rehab, and sat through countless meetings and therapy groups, the majority of which went over my head or passed me by in a haze, then I came across the theory of “Rat Park” and suddenly everything I thought that I knew about addiction was flipped on its head in an instant.

So, what is “Rat Park” and what can it teach us?

In the 1970s a series of experiments were carried out on rats to try and prove a theory that drugs alone cause drug addiction. Rats were kept in barren cages and given a choice of plain drinking water or water laced with cocaine or heroin and when the rats repeatedly choose to drink the drugged water (often until they overdosed and died) the scientists concluded that their theory was right: that the drugs alone cause drug addiction.

But here’s the thing. Rats are highly intelligent social creatures, like us. They need company and things to occupy their time if they are to thrive and stay well, and so another scientist, Bruce Alexander, took a different approach.

He suspected that the rats were choosing the drugs as a way to escape their loneliness and pain at finding themselves trapped in an environment that was completely alien to them, and so to prove this theory he created “Rat Park”.

Rat Park was, in essence, a heaven for rats, providing everything a rat could ever need in order to be happy and thrive, and while the rats in this experiment also had access to both the plain and drugged water, most chose to drink only the plain, and the few that did choose the drugged water did so only occasionally.

None of the rats got addicted. None of the rats died from drug overdose.

He then took the experiment further by introducing heavily addicted rats into Rat Park, which is where things get interesting. In this environment, instead of choosing the drugged water as would be expected, the rats began to shy away from it, choosing to drink the plain water instead and going through painful withdrawals (often to the point of death) in order to get themselves well again. 

Why? Because their environment had changed, and they had hope for a better future.

Alexander concluded that the rats weren’t choosing the drugs because they liked being addicted, they were using them for the very same reasons we humans do: as a way to escape loneliness, isolation and pain.

Their environment was alien to them, only their very basic needs were being met (in the form of food and water) and they had no hope of escape unless they were physically set free.

By changing their environment and filling it with positive things that they needed to thrive both physically and mentally, their desire to self-medicate began to fall away and, as a result, they started to get well.

So, if the rats chose escapism as a way of coping with their loneliness and pain, and addiction was the result of that, then what if we could use the theory of Rat Park as a recovery tool? One which can help people ‘break free from their cages’ by addressing the issues causing them to become addicted in the first place, as well as treating the addiction itself?

I believe that we can. I also believe that applying the theory of Rat Park and looking at what was in my own ‘cage’ has been pivotal in my own recovery, which is why I feel compelled to share it.

There was no ‘Recovery Handbook’ when I started my sobriety journey; nothing that explained triggers or cravings to me, or how to manage my emotions when they started coming back so hard and so fast that they completely overwhelmed me. Nothing to refer to if I felt lost, lonely, or just a little bit unsure about how this whole sobriety thing was supposed to work once I left the safety-net of rehab and found myself back out in the ‘real world’ (along with all of my real-world problems) and so I wrote one. And in this book I share everything that kept me safe and helped me on my own journey back in those early days when everything was weird and wobbly (and at times a little overwhelming), in the hope that this knowledge will help you (or someone you know) with recovery too.

I am incredibly grateful to Alex Bax, Dr Caroline Shulman and everyone at Pathway Homeless and Inclusion Health, who not only supported me while I wrote this book, but who also very generously agreed to publish it. Our hope now is that Finding Rat Park will be useful to anyone striving for a life in recovery, but especially those leaving addiction treatment with little or no follow-on support. 

To purchase copies of Finding Rat Park for yourself or your organisation, please contact info@pathway.org

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