Sober One co-founder and psychiatrist Marat Aginyan says:
“I’ve been working for 10 years in the official Russian narcology and I saw that typical post-Soviet narcologists have nothing to do with science. I wanted to create an adequate and evidence-based medicine-oriented program for addicts, so I dug into the research, visited addictive rehabilitation centers, and found what would help a person to quit successfully.
This requires three components: an action plan, motivation, and support. We "sewed" these components into the application using modern scientific methods — James Prochazka's transtheoretical model of behavioral changes (TTM), motivational interviewing (MI), cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).
TTM describes what stages a person goes through to change: contemplation, determination, action, maintenance. MI helps the interlocutor explore their motives, remove motivational barriers, and take action. CBT relieves a person of the power of irrational beliefs about use and sobriety.
Over the years of working as a narcologist, I also realized that those people who have joined some kind of community program quitted successfully. And the scientific evidence also suggests that the convalescent community is a powerful therapeutic factor. ”
Soviet narcology assumed that the addict was an object that had to be manipulated and kept sober all the time. Sober One has a different position — we believe that this approach should be left in the past: everyone has the resources to do it on their own."
