Who James is — the lived authority and its limit.

James Roberts. Born in Manchester in 1976. Sober since June 2020, after four weeks as a paying patient at Delamere, in Cheshire. Twenty-seven years of daily drinking before that, and nearly twenty years spent headhunting travel and hospitality executives. Tenerife — the chair I work from; nearly six years on this side of it.

The lived authority on this page is one admission, at one clinic, in one country, in one year, from one set of circumstances. That is real and it is also a limit:

• I went into a UK clinic in 2020. The programme has moved since. Specifics may be different now.
• I had insurance and the means to choose the clinic. Not everyone does. The pages say so where it matters, and the cost question is procurement, which is not answered on this site.
• I went in alone, as an adult with no children at home. The four weeks for a parent of young children, for a primary carer, for a person going in under a court order, look different. The SI (super intelligence) guide will say so plainly.
• I did not have a co-occurring serious mental illness or a complex polysubstance picture. Both change the four weeks materially. I am not the right narrator for those. I will say so.
• I am a man, in my fifties, white, English-speaking. The four weeks for a woman in a mixed-sex unit, for a non-English speaker, for someone whose cultural background is not the dominant one in the room, are not identical to mine. The page names the gap; it does not pretend to fill it.

The bias is named. The lived authority earns the page where it earns it, and stops where it stops.

What happened after

After the four weeks I spent several years in Tenerife running Casa Salvia, a guest house where a good number of guests were in recovery — from several countries and several treatment systems, at every stage from weeks to decades. I was not their clinician and not their sponsor. I was the man making breakfast, and I learned a great deal from that position, chiefly how differently the same four weeks land on different people. Casa Salvia has been sold and is not operating; it is not somewhere anybody can come and stay, and nothing on this site is an offer of a bed, a stay or a placement.

I am a declared past paying patient of a British clinic. I take no referral fee from anyone, I endorse no clinic and no fellowship, and I am not clinically qualified in anything. What this desk refuses sets out the rest, and how this site is written states the conflict in full.