I'm not in recovery from a substance use disorder or a diagnosed mental health condition, and I'm not going to pretend I am for the sake of a good hook. But while I was pulling the numbers for this page, I said out loud that some days I feel like I need my own recovery month, just from being a single mom. School just started, the schedule doesn't slow down, and most days I don't get a pause button either. That is not the same weight as what someone escaping addiction carries, and I'm not setting my tired next to their survival. It did make one thing obvious to me though: recovery gets treated like it belongs to a narrow group of people, when almost 50 million American adults call themselves in recovery from something right now, and most of them don't match the picture most of us carry around.
70% of women entering addiction treatment are already mothers. Only 13% of outpatient and residential treatment facilities run a program built for pregnant or postpartum women. 7% of hospital inpatient facilities do.
Trauma runs underneath a lot of this and rarely gets screened for. Somewhere between 55% and 99% of women in addiction treatment carry a trauma history, and more than 7 in 10 report a history of sexual abuse, compared to roughly 1 in 5 women in the general population. Add the racial gap on top: Black women complete treatment at a rate 12.4 percentage points lower than white men, the widest gap of any group measured, and the disparity is about access and provider bias, not effort.
Then there's who gets skipped in a different way. Veterans, rural communities, and LGBTQ+ people carry documented gaps of their own, and they rarely get airtime in a conversation that's usually framed around one story.
Recovery isn't rare. It's just under-discussed for almost everyone who isn't the version of it we're used to picturing.