Gerard Connors is director of the Research Institute on Addictions at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has studied Alcoholics Anonymous participation, spirituality and alcohol outcomes.

Margaret Ensminger is a professor and associate chairwoman of the department of health, behavior and society at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. She has studied inner-city youths and families and has done research on the effect of family religiosity on young adults’ alcohol use.

Save Our Selves, or Secular Organizations for Sobriety, was founded in North Hollywood, Calif., in 1985 as an alternative to AA. The largest secular sobriety group in the world, it has 100,000 members, including believers who want to keep religion separate from recovery as well as atheists, secular humanists and non-Christians. It respects diversity, welcomes skepticism […]

LifeRing Secular Recovery International in Oakland, Calif., was founded in 1999 as a secular alternative to AA. LifeRing does not subscribe to any particular theory of alcoholism/addiction but is held together by a common commitment to abstinence.

Women for Sobriety in Quakertown, Pa., describes itself as the first national self-help program for women alcoholics. It was founded by the late Jean Kirkpatrick in 1975 with the belief that women with addictions had different psychological needs in recovery than men. This notion stemmed from the fact that at that time, men had better recovery […]

Rational Recovery in Lotus, Calif., is a program of independent recovery based on abstinence and banishing of self-doubt. It uses the Addictive Voice Recognition Technique, which is taught on the program’s web site in eight 90-minute sessions. RR has no groups, meetings or treatment centers and maintains that its technique is incompatible with AA and other […]

Self-Management and Recovery Training in Mentor, Ohio, uses rational emotive behavior therapy and cognitive behavior therapy in a self-help, abstinence-based addiction recovery program. SMART does not accept the disease concept of alcoholism and is not a 12-step program. It was founded in 1992 when it split off from Rational Recovery.

The Christopher D. Smithers Foundation in Mill Neck, N.Y., was founded in 1952 to focus on alcoholism education and prevention, based on the conviction that alcoholism is a treatable disease that requires abstinence and that controlled drinking, whether called “moderation management” or “harm reduction,” is not possible with alcoholism. The foundation has worked to reduce the stigma […]

The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence in New York City was founded in 1944 by Marty Mann to teach the public that alcoholism is a preventable and treatable disease. The first woman to stay sober in AA, Mann wanted to transform the view of alcoholism from a moral failing into a public health issue. The […]