What Did We Learn from Our Study on Sober Living Houses and Where Do We Go from Here? PMC

With expert guidance to navigate the challenges of opening a sober living facility, you’ll have peace of mind and more time to focus on providing the complete place of healing. Opening a sober living home is not as easy as just buying or renting a home and opening the door to those in addiction or recovery. Whether it is a non-profit or private venture, a sober living home is a fully operational organization with customers, personnel, regulations, financial transactions and more. This page will discuss sober living facilities, how they operate, and what duration of stay in sober living facilities is ideal.

Items are rated on a 5-point scale and ask about symptoms over the past 7 days. We used the Global Severity Index (GSI) as an overall measure of psychiatric severity. Join the thousands of people that have called a treatment provider for rehab information. Due to how interchangeably these Selecting the Most Suitable Sober House for Addiction Recovery terms are used, it is important to ask questions about expectations and structure to determine which home is the right fit for you. Julia Childs Heyl is a clinical social worker who focuses on mental health disparities, the healing of generational trauma, and depth psychotherapy.

Who Can Live in a Recovery House?

Residents of sober living facilities are responsible for contributing to the household and usually must attend 12-step meetings or similar support groups during their stay. It’s totally fair to wonder how sober living homes work at first — after all, most of us don’t encounter them in our day-to-day lives. We’ll go over the different types of people who typically benefit from a sober living situation or substance abuse halfway house in a later section. For right now, just know that if any of this sounds appealing, look into it.

Having said that, this whole area is very under-developed, with little in the way of recovery housing being commissioned (or even known about), though there is evidence that this is changing a bit for the better. The study design used repeated measures analyses to test how study measures varied over time. Because the two types of houses served residents with different demographic characteristics, we conducted disaggregated longitudinal analyses for each.

Length of Stay in a Transitional Sober Living Home

To join a sober living house, residents must pay their own rent, which could range anywhere from $500 to $5,000 per month, depending on the location and whether certain houses include meals and other services. Residents may not have to pay for utilities at all, making housing very affordable. In our comprehensive guide, we share the truth about sober living homes, including what it is like living in a sober house and how it factors into the long-term recovery process.

For instance, some homes request residents to check in with a house manager, and some houses will require periodic drug tests. Many sober houses also have agreements with residents, requiring them to attend 12-step programs or similar support groups. This Recovery Review post is by David McCartney, who is an addiction medicine specialist and Clinical Lead at LEAP, a quasi-residential therapeutic community addiction treatment program in Scotland. He trained as a family medicine practitioner and spent much of his career in practice in inner-city Glasgow.