Nearly 5 million Americans woke up on New Year’s Day with champagne headaches and a new resolve to renounce drinking. Traditionally, that would involve pouring out the content of one’s liquor cabinet and heading to a doctor’s office or an AA meeting.
But in the wilds of Reddit — of all imaginable places — more than 30,000 recovering problem drinkers have found that there might be another way. It’s called r/StopDrinking, and it is, in a nutshell, the Internet’s unlikely answer to traditional addiction therapy.
“I tried everything,” said one member of the forum, who goes by the username Cake_Or_Radish and has been sober for more than 560 days. “The support I saw in (StopDrinking) on day one felt like nothing I had experienced in hundreds of AA or SMART meetings.”
As a thriving online community and as a possible new vector for addiction treatment, r/StopDrinking is a fascinating case study. It is run entirely by volunteers, most of whom are former alcoholics. It includes an astounding 31,339 subscribing members, as of this writing, plus untold thousands who view the forum but don’t subscribe or comment.
Of those subscribers, one in five say r/StopDrinking is their sole support group, and most say they visit multiple times a month. A majority of subscribers call it their most helpful tool in their fight against alcohol, more so even than counseling, rehab or more-formal peer-recovery groups. Similar self-help forums on Reddit, such as r/loseit, have recorded similar successes.
Experts don’t doubt it: While StopDrinking lacks a Big Book, a step program or even a coherent philosophy on addiction and recovery, it includes all the hallmarks of an effective peer-support program.
“It’s the fellowship factor that’s effective,” said John Kelly, an addiction researcher at Harvard Medical School. “There’s accountability and monitoring over time. There’s 24/7 support. There’s cheerleading. It’s incredibly valuable, especially early on.”
In many respects, in fact, StopDrinking functions much like a conventional peer support-group. There’s a daily check-in, where members affirm they’re sobriety. (“It’s been 30 days.” “I’m in!” “Sober weekends are where it’s at!”)
There are badges — each personally bestowed, along with a congratulatory note, by one of the forum’s six moderators — that celebrate the days or weeks since each user’s last drink.
There’s a 24/7 chat room, where users can stop in for conversation or emergency help. A virtual book club and movie night once helped members adjust to sober social schedules. In the main forum, where dozens of people post every day, members share their revelations (“I’m happy again!”), struggles (“a post to help me get through my cravings”) and questions (“does controlled drinking ever work?”).
During the holidays — a particularly trying time for many recovering alcoholics — the forum lit up with tips for surviving a sober Christmas with the in-laws and suggested replacements for the usual holiday drinks. (Pomegranate juice and sparkling cider are, far and away, the favorites.) On New Year’s Eve, hundreds of members signed a pledge not to imbibe. In another life, they may have cherished the evening’s bar crawls and midnight toasts; now they settled into their couches early, nursing a soda water, laptops open.
“I remember once saying that if I needed to I was going to check in (to StopDrinking) via my phone underneath the table at Thanksgiving dinner,” said Cakes, a Redditor from Washington, D.C. “I totally meant it.”
Cakes recalls logging into StopDrinking frequently during the holidays or while traveling; it’s when she most feared a relapse. A single woman with a high-powered job, she’d gone out of her way to hide her drinking as it escalated in her mid-30s — reassuring herself, as many female alcoholics do, that she was still “high-functioning.”
Few of her friends and family knew how much she drank; she certainly didn’t share with them every time she relapsed or celebrated another sober month. But in StopDrinking, thousands watched her progress daily as she reset her “badge,” the little icon next to each user’s name that celebrates how long they’ve been sober: Seven days. Fourteen days. Zero days. Seven days. Two months. Zero again.
“In the very beginning, SD was so integral to my sobriety,” she said, “because I felt like it made me accountable, not only to myself but to thousands of strangers.”
It’s fitting, and not entirely coincidental, that r/StopDrinking came of age just as researchers and clinicians began to rethink exactly how alcoholism treatment works. In a brochure last year, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, a division of the National Institutes of Health, began pushing treatments such as medication and cognitive-behavioral therapy, right next to 12-step programs and traditional rehab. Meanwhile, a series of breakthrough studies have finally demystified the efficacy of Alcoholics Anonymous, particularly over the long-term.
Surprisingly, Kelly and others have found, it’s the peer solidarity that really works — not the ritual introductions, the religious overtones or the much-revered Big Book.
That means that any good addiction-recovery therapy essentially should do three things, Kelly said. One: Teach cognitive-behavioral coping skills, like the ability to deal with bouts of depression and anger, and confidence in the face of stress or temptation. Two: Change the addict’s social network, so that she changes her lifestyle and gets fewer cues to drink. Three: Motivate people to recover, largely by reminding them how they lived and felt before.
“Addiction is still seen as a moral or a motivational problem, and that makes people very afraid to admit it,” said George Koob, the NIAAA’s director. “Particularly to a man in a white coat, who’s an authority figure.”
Communities such as StopDrinking override that stigma by letting people connect in complete anonymity, direct from their computers and smartphones.
