SoberRecovery. com Celebrates 5 Years of Helping Alcoholics and Addicts Find Recovery
Palm Springs, CA – September 19th, 2005 – Pioneer Alcoholism, Addiction and Mental Health help site celebrates 5th Birthday, continuing to guide alcoholics, addicts and their families towards hope, help and recovery. www. SoberRecovery. com offers addiction information, help and support for loved ones, as well as hundreds of treatment options for addicts ready to call it quits.
Palm Springs, CA (PRWEB) September 19, 2005
Just this past August 29th, President George W. Bush officially proclaimed the month of September to be National Alcohol and Drug Addiction Recovery Month. That is good news to people like Jon Heller, the founder of www. SoberRecovery. com and advocate of the recent "addiction awareness" nod on the part of government. September also happens to be the same month that SoberRecovery. com - a growing Alcoholism, Addiction and Mental Health Portal - was launched, exactly five years ago on September 25th. The site now receives almost 10,000 visitors daily who view more than 1 million pages every month. That adds up to a lot of information for addicts and alcoholics looking to start a sober life, or start one over again. Information is one thing SR has in spades. Type in the keywords, “alcohol and addiction recovery” or “alcohol and drug treatment” in Google and you’ll most often find the site at or near the very top. With 2,473 Recovery Resources in 57 unique Categories, SoberRecovery is referenced 171,000 times in Google alone, and has more than 33,000 of its pages indexed by Yahoo. The site's online visibility is only continuing to grow as even more similar sites continue to crop up.
Long before the search engines discovered the addictions resource library, SoberRecoveryÂ’s growth began with an overwhelming response from the recovery community at large who quickly found an online home. Members of the SoberRecovery Community have since put up 473,628 posts, or messages, either seeking help and support or giving help and support. Twenty volunteer moderators from all over the world dedicate hundreds of hours to the online recovery community, doing their best to keep a new person from getting lost in the shuffle. This much is certain; with over 5,585,327 visitors to date the site, always open and always free thanks to its sponsors, is making a positive impact on peopleÂ’s lives.
It all started from a donated computer run from the kitchen of the Sober Living apartments that Jon Heller called home. What would later become SoberRecovery. com initially began as a simple, three-page list of resources for alcoholics and addicts who also had been diagnosed for depression or bi-polar disorder. SoberRecovery. com was officially launched September 15, 2000 as a free resource library for those seeking recovery from alcoholism, drug abuse, eating disorders, and mental illness. It soon became the starting point for parents, spouses and significant others of addicts and alcoholics. Each year it has grown in terms of visitors, members and sponsor-funded support. “No one could have predicted this“, says Heller, the site’s founder.
SoberRecovery. com continues to expand as an always-growing recovery portal for addicts and alcoholics seeking help, concerned friends, family and loved ones needing support, and for the treatment centers and organizations that provide help,. The site is a safe place for those new to recovery to hook-up with those who have already “been there.” Even the smallest addiction-support organization can have its programs seen by thousands of people a day on the SoberRecovery. com web site, free of charge.
SoberRecovery. com is much more than an addictions information site, according to its founder and developer, Heller. “SoberRecovery. com really is a living, breathing community. Thousands of visitors from all over the world come together in cyber-space and actually help each other. With just a little imagination you can watch as new people enter the site, in pain because of their addiction or an addicted loved one, and are greeted and surrounded by others who give of themselves. It’s amazing. Goose-bump amazing.”
Live chat was added to the Forums a few years ago, and there are moderated online meetings almost every night. The resident ‘Ask the Experts’ moderators are both published and known throughout the recovery community. “Mark and Guy don’t really have to be here”, says Heller. “Both have books, and sites and plenty to do. All of our moderators and volunteers have families, jobs and/or school to think about. But they show up and help out. Without them, we’re just a list of links. A few years ago that was enough. Today there are lots of recovery sites all over the Internet. What makes us different is that our moderators, our volunteers, our community members and our sponsors have become really good at - and committed to - what they are doing.”
Recently, one site visitor shared her experience with SoberRecovery. com by relating, “I have made some wonderful friends from all over the globe and I know that I would be a lot further back in my recovery had it not been for all the wisdom that is shared on these boards. Everyone here nudged me when my thinking went awry, held me up when I left my ex last December, cheered me on when I moved back to my home town, put things in perspective when I beat myself up… Thank you, Jon [Heller], for laying the foundations for such a wonderful community.”
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