Research on The Tree House Recovery Model for Treating Substance Use Disorder

Tree House Academy and Research Institute collects post treatment client health data In order to gain a deeper understanding of Tree House program post treatment efficacy in specific areas such as use of tools learned at Tree House, indicators of prefrontal cortex functionality, physiological health indicators, and conditions of life after treatment. This study was published in 2019 and contains a data sample of 118 men who were admitted to one of the programs that uses the Tree House Recovery substance abuse treatment model

PURPOSE: To test the effect of a vigorous exercise prescription on drug abstinence in voluntary rehabilitation patients. METHODS: 25 surveyed participants in a male drug treatment program underwent a 12-week minimum training program. The program included moderate-rigorous exercise and psychotherapy. Three days per week all subjects participated in Embodied Presence Yoga for 90 minutes. Subjects also participated in Action Based Induction Therapy 3 days per week where each session lasted 2 hours. Subjects also participated in physical fitness which ran for 90 minutes 5 days per week. Within each week, program participants also completed between 2-3 hours of psychotherapy (individual and/or group) per day, varying depending on level of care and phase of the treatment process. Exercise performance and adherence, sobriety and relapse rates, and emotional coping skills were collected. RESULTS: Subjects experienced frequent relapse (5-8 occurrences) prior to admission; however, 84% were currently sober on completion of the program, 8% relapsed during treatment, and 36% relapsed after treatment. The longest duration of sobriety a subject achieved was 273 111 days. Post-treatment survey results indicate 84% of subjects still exercised regularly, 68% continued to practice yoga or meditation, and 60% 8 followed a diet that required disciplined awareness.

Tree House Recovery is working with Dr. James Pennebaker of Univeristy of Texas in Austin to analyze writing samples of patients who were in Tree House Recovery’s Naked Writing program using his Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; pronounced "Luke"), a computerized text analysis program that outputs the percentage of words in a given text that fall into one or more of over 80 linguistic (e.g., first-person singular pronouns, conjunctions), psychological (e.g., anger, achievement), and topical (e.g., leisure, money) categories. It builds on previous research establishing strong links between linguistic patterns and personality or psychological state. Tree House Academy and Research Institute hopes to find predictive patterns that could indicate how well a patient admitted to one our programs will do after treatment. The way we are analyzing this material includes analyzing writing samples of graduates from several years ago with the LIWC computer and then correlating the results of that information with things such as adherence to abstinence. By knowing this information we can then adjust our writing modality in such a way to encourage patterns that would result in long term sobriety and abstinence from mind altering substances. This research is currently in process and not available to the public