Transforming Lives Through Community: How Dunham House Breaks Addiction and Mental Illness Cycles

Life at Dunham House is designed to help us become a contributing and aware person again.

When we live with others, such as a partner, our larger family or even if we live alone, we develop habits of behaviour. For people with mental illness, depression and addictions, it is the same. Those close to us respond to our behaviour, and set up their own habitual responses. Soon all parties dance to the same music. If we live alone, we magnify our responses to our feelings. As the cycle of challenge and response continues over time, the behaviours can get worse. Only a change in the social and physical environment can help.

This is also what happens with our addictions. For addictions are also habits. We are challenged, and we respond by going to our addiction. In many cases, our relationships at home drive the addiction response. When our partners object, we find ways of hiding what we do. Home is where our addictions are reinforced. When we live alone, then there are no barriers to us relying and reinforcing our addictions.

Dunham House enables us to make a break with the environment that drives our illness and our addictions. It does this by making a shift in the social and physical environment.

The process starts with sharing a room. By sharing a room with someone that we don’t know at first, a new set of responses is required. We can’t play the same old tapes, and so get the same old predictable reactions. Being now part of a wider community of other residents and staff, vital personal habits are also restored, such as self-care, personal hygiene, and eating good food on a regular basis. There are no cleaning staff at Dunham House. Habits of keeping your private space clean and tidy are recreated as are the wider habits of contributing to the public spaces as well.

It continues with strict and knowledgeable prohibition of the agents of addiction. In a community of peers, hardly a trick is unknown.

None of this happens as a result of judgement. Dunham House is mostly a community of people who have all shared the same experience. The new resident learns from the behaviours and the personal leadership of those residents that have been there longer. The new resident can later become that community leader for the residents that come after. The ability to consider others again is rediscovered. When the resident leaves, they are not cut off from this community. Dunham House is creating an online support group for its graduates.

Of course, Dunham House offers expert care and programs, what makes Dunham House unique is its community.