Healing Gardens: Exploring Addiction Recovery Through Nature
A garden waiting to be tilled. A research question. A chance to form a lasting partnership.
Those were the ingredients that Teresa Horton, PhD, proposed could help better addiction recovery.
“The Alliance for Research in Chicagoland Communities (ARCC) provides seed grants for partnership building with the idea of being a matchmaker between faculty and community in the Chicago region,” says Horton, a research associate professor in Northwestern’s Department of Anthropology.
So, in 2021, Horton and David Victorson, PhD, professor of Medical Social Sciences explored the idea of expanding a two-year old relationship between members of the Northwestern University community and Above and Beyond (AnB), a nonprofit, outpatient addiction treatment center on the West Side of Chicago. Founded in 2015, AnB serves hundreds of community members fighting addiction every year with treatment resources reinforced with housing, employment, and food pantry services.
The process of being interviewed allowed participants to focus on certain aspects of the garden and made them think about what they were doing and connect it with their healing process, their recovery process.”
“This research project seemed like a great way for us to work together as faculty and also work with what sounded like a really engaging community organization,” says Horton.
The Gardening for Recovery & Optimal Wellbeing (GROW) project was one of 14 academic-community partnerships to receive funding as part of the 2021 ARCC Seed Grant program.
Launching the program involved some learning before any plants could grow.
“The folks at AnB really knew nothing about the research process and I certainly didn't know anything about what it’s like to deal with the logistics of a substance use clinic that specifically works with low-income and many people who are homeless,” recalls Horton.
During initial planning, however, the team found something interesting. As they talked to clients, they learned storytelling was an important tool for recovery.
“The process of being interviewed allowed participants to focus on certain aspects of the garden and made them think about what they were doing and connect it with their healing process, their recovery process,” Horton says.
Through various iterations of interviews, it was clear that putting the participants in the driver’s seat was going to be vital to the program’s success.
“As important as the researchers are, it's also really important for our clients and our patients to be able to say what things mean to them, rather than to have someone else interpreting it for them,” says Ryan Gorz, the grant compliance coordinator for AnB. “We want to be the ones empowering them.”
Feasibility Study
The researchers used the ARCC funding to conduct a feasibility study of PhotoVoice as a therapeutic tool.
“You essentially give people cameras, and in a research context you ask them to go out and take pictures about the aspects of their life that are related to some research question that you're interested in,” says Horton. “What we decided to do was to see if we could adapt PhotoVoice to become a therapeutic tool.”
There is no such thing as an unworthy plant, it is only a misplaced plant. Everything and everyone has a purpose.”
Participants were prompted to do things like: Take a picture of where you are in recovery, then, go out to the garden and capture photos you believe represent that for yourself. The cameras made instant-print photos and participants were able to share work in a group setting.
“If you can imagine being in a group therapy session where it's always ‘sit in the circle, stare at each other, and talk about your deep feelings,’ that could be kind of uncomfortable,” says Horton. “Using PhotoVoice caused people to open up and share their emotions and talk about them more than they did in other types of therapeutic settings.”
Much to Offer
On September 9, 2017, West Side native Steven Diggs came to AnB and successfully pursued treatment. He has been clean ever since.
“In seven years, I've seen a whole bunch of lives change,” says Diggs, who now works as a peer-support specialist for AnB and was part of the community advisory board for GROW. He used his lived experience and connections at the center to give his input into how the program could best help the community.
“The garden has so much to offer. It gave the clients an outlet to get outside of themselves and do something different … The garden was a place of solitude.”
He said he believes the garden gives people hope, but there’s also practical help like letting community members take food and flowers back to their own homes.
“Just by working in the garden, tending flowers, so much can happen. Something so small can make it so big,” Diggs said.
Thirty-three patients participated in the program and Horton and her team are in the process of reflecting on the data. They hope to see the project grow in the future.
“Our three main goals of developing the program, figuring out whether it's feasible, and whether it was of interest and acceptable to the clients were answered,” Horton says. “The patients were able to speak very poetically about the photographs that they were taking. They were able to make connections between the photos that they took and what was going on in their lives.”
“There is no such thing as an unworthy plant, it is only a misplaced plant. Everything and everyone has a purpose,” a therapist reported a patient saying in one discussion group.
The connection to nature, Horton says, has always been important to human healing.
“Spending time in a garden may not replace other forms of therapy, but it can be an adjunctive therapy that helps people learn how to regulate their behavior. It gives them an opportunity to connect with themselves, to connect with more than the human world, and to connect with other people through the garden, which all can provide a greater support in the recovery process.”
Interacting with researchers and learning how to incorporate research and data collection is part of AnB’s long-term goals, says Gorz.
“Being able to partner with people who have research experience is really valuable to make sure that we can be here for our community in the best way that we can,” he explained. “Like a garden, we want to cultivate it, and we want to build it so that it can pay dividends for our community going forward.”
At the end of the day, Horton says the program is only valuable when it helps patients’ journey to healing.
“The idea of caring for something that is alive — watching it grow, watching it have setbacks, and watching it recover is an incredible metaphor for their recovery process.”
Written by Bella Laufenberg
