The Women's Recovery Group Study: Stage I Trial

The Women's Recovery Group (WRG) is a manual-based group therapy for women heterogeneous with respect to their substance use disorder, co-occurring psychiatric disorders, trauma history, age, and stage of life. The WRG is a 12-session, structured relapse-prevention group therapy that utilizes a cognitive behavioral approach and includes gender-specific content and single-gender group composition. Individual session content was derived from research on gender-specific substance abuse antecedents, consequences, and treatment outcomes. The overall goals of the treatment are to (1) promote abstinence from all substances including alcohol; (2) improve understanding of specific aspects of SUDs, recovery, and relapse that are relevant to women, and (3) help participants with skills and strategies useful in preventing relapse and promoting recovery.

Group Drug Counseling (GDC) is a standard 12-week, 90-minute mixed-gender group therapy. The overall goals of GDC are to 1) help patients to achieve abstinence from all substances of abuse; 2) educate patients regarding recovery from substance use disorders; 3) increase patients' self-awareness of the problems that their substance use disorder has caused; 4) encourage patients to give mutual support; and 5) help patients learn new ways to cope with problems in order to prevent relapse. The GDC was chosen as the comparison group to approximate group drug counseling that is consistent with treatment as usual within the community.