Architecture of Recovery, a newsletter for people who believe recovery deserves better

I’ve worked in addiction recovery long enough to know this: most systems fail the people they were built to help.

That’s a hard thing to say out loud. Especially for someone who’s dedicated the last two decades building, managing and improving those very systems.

But it’s the truth.

And if we don't speak it - if we don’t admit that something is fundamentally broken - we can't fix it. And people will keep falling through the cracks.

People who should be recovering. People who deserve better People who could be thriving.

This newsletter exists because I’ve seen the difference between recovery by default and recovery by design. I’ve spent years in the trenches. Supporting clients, leading teams, building services, writing guidelines, training professionals.

I’ve made mistakes, learned the hard way and refused to settle for good-enough answers. And I wanted to find a way of handing over a roadmap of sorts. To help the people travelling the path behind me, side-step the pitfalls I have encountered and capitalize on what works.

This newsletter is designed to do just that.

The Architecture of Recovery isn’t just an idea. It’s a framework grounded in practice for professionals who want to stop firefighting and start building something that holds.

I didn’t set out to create a new framework.

I didn’t wake up one day thinking, “I’m going to redesign recovery.”

Honestly, I just wanted to be a better practitioner.

I wanted to understand why so many of my people were struggling - even when they had all the “right” support in place.

I remember one team meeting in particular. We were reviewing a case. The client had relapsed. Again. There had been countless hours of therapy. A solid discharge plan. Peer support lined up. And yet, two weeks out of treatment, everything had collapsed. One of my colleagues sighed and said, “We did everything we could.”

I couldn’t accept that.

Because I knew it wasn’t true.

We hadn't done everything. We’d done everything we’d been trained to do.

Everything we had time for. Everything that fit inside a fragmented system full of blind spots.

But we hadn’t built recovery.

We’d built a temporary pause in the chaos.

And crossed our fingers it wouldn’t collapse.

That was the moment I stopped trying to fix people inside a broken system - and started thinking about building something better.

What started as frustration became a blueprint - and eventually, a framework that professionals now use to design recovery that actually works.

Without structure, recovery collapses under pressure. We ask people to stay sober, stay safe, stay stable, but we don’t give them anything solid to stand on.

This isn’t a recovery system. It’s a patchwork. And in some places, it’s a performance.

We’ve spent 50 years bouncing between models: moral, medical, trauma, developmental, learning. DSM and ICD definitions keep shifting. We argue about what addiction is, coming up with hundreds of definitions, while funding gets cut and frontline staff drown in admin.

And the result?

A field that’s over-intellectualised, under-resourced and frustratingly inconsistent.

Treatment that is incredibly underfunded, over-stretched, narrow-focused and short-termed in the public and charity sectors.

Too many services depend more on individual brilliance and improvisation than on sound structure. Interventions can vary wildly across providers, often lacking even the basic safeguards of evidence, supervision, or continuity.

Let me ask you:

If a person enters recovery in Birmingham, should they receive the same level of support, quality, and accountability as someone in Glasgow? Or London? Or a village in east Kent?

We’d all like to say yes.

But the reality is: we have no shared standards for what recovery support should look like.

Professionals try to plug the gaps with passion and improvisation. But the gaps keep growing. Recovery collapses when systems fail not when people do.

The cost is real. Clients disengage. Professionals burn out. Lived experience gets tokenised. Services perform on paper but fall apart in practice. We have no shared standards. No common language. No integrity.

So, what do we do?

I think we have to go back to basics.

Not just to theory, but to design, quality delivery and constant evaluation of our impact.

Because, when we don’t design for recovery, we leave it to chance…

We cross our fingers and send people home, hoping they’ll stay strong, stay safe, stay connected.

That’s not good enough. Not for them. Not for us.

But when we engineer recovery, when we build it like something precious and essential, we give people more than a second chance.

We give them a structure they can rely on.We give professionals the tools they need to do great work.We give services a roadmap they can follow - and improve.We build something that lasts.

 If you care about delivering better outcomes in recovery, this newsletter is for you.

Whether you’re a practitioner, manager, commissioner, or peer supporter, this newsletter will help you think differently, work more sustainably, and lead more effectively, without burning out or giving up.

Subscribe to Architecture of Recovery to have access to weekly practical tools, insights, and reflections from the frontline of addiction services on building recovery systems that hold.

Thanks for reading,

Dragos