AA Success Rate

What is the success rate of recovery in AA and other 12 step programs?

Good question. The answer is not as easy to pin down as many of us would think. I think we have a tendency to believe that "someone out there" must certainly have all the data on everything. We hear statistics quoted on the news, we see facts published in the newspaper, and we just generally get a mountain of data thrown at us every day. So we tend to think that there are good numbers out there, hard data, that represent the facts, and we tend to put a lot of stock in these numbers.

Regarding 12 step programs, this is just not a reality. There are a number of problems that prevent us from really knowing what the true success rate in recovery is for AA.

For starters, there is the anonymity factor. The program was designed from the ground up with anonymity and confidentiality in mind, so it is very difficult to get reliable data on people in the fellowship. The nature of the disease means that those who relapse are much less likely to participate in a follow up survey, especially if it is several years later. Yet this is exactly the situation we have in studying the effectiveness of recovery programs: we need to track who stays sober and who does not. There is also going to be a shame factor involved, so you might get some skewed data from this too. For example, if you call someone who has alcohol addiction for a follow up phone survey after 5 years has passed, and they have since relapsed, is that person always going to be honest about their relapse in every single case? Sure, some will, but many will not, purely out of the shame that they may no loger be able to stay clean and sober. So it can be difficult to obtain reliable data simply due to the nature of the disease.

It is also difficult to even define success in some cases. For example, say you are doing a survey for recovering alcoholics who started out in AA and you are trying to determine the effectiveness of the AA program. Let's say you survey 500 alcoholics one year after they get sober in AA. Here are some contingencies you are going to have to deal with:

1) Those who are still sober but no longer attend AA. (count them as a success or a failure?)

2) Those who are still sober but still attend AA, but they had a slip at some point during the first year. They are sober today though. (Again, success or failure?).

3) Those who have stayed sober from alcohol but perhaps use some other drug such as painkillers or Marijuana.

So you can see that it is difficult to even define what success is in some cases, and therefore this can make it very difficult to measure. Even the Big Book of AA shows just how subjective this whole process can be, as they state that about half of all alcoholics stayed sober "out of those who really tried." What? So they did not count the alcoholics who they thought did not "really try?" This is just plain crazy, and you can imagine how many people do not "really try" in 12 step programs these days, as they now have a huge influx of 12 step members from the courts and legal system. Apparently none of these people who are court ordered to AA are going to be part of the success and failure statistics?

Interestingly enough, one study has shown that the same percentage of alcoholics find success in AA, regardless of whether or not they were a voluntary participant or whether they were court ordered to attend. So in other words, about 5 percent made it to a year sober, regardless of whether they were self motivated or not. Normally, everyone assumes that the self motivated group has a higher chance for success in AA. Turns out this is not true.