The Minnesota Model in the Management of Drug and Alcohol Dependency: miracle,method or myth? Part I. The Philosophy and the Programme ★

The Minnesota Model is an abstinence orientated, comprehensive, multi-professional approach to the treatment of the addictions, based upon the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. It espouses a disease concept of drug and alcohol dependency with the promise of recovery, but not cure, for those who adhere to it. The programme is intensive, offering group therapy, lectures, and counselling based upon a pattern developed in Minnesota, in the United States, during the late 1940s and the 1950s. Its origins and content are distinct from the‘Concept Houses’and the wider Therapeutic Community movement, but it incorporates themes held in common with both of these treatment approaches.