About this Sober House
Mind, Body, Soul Recovery House is a men's recovery residence on Church Street in Lebanon, New Hampshire, in Grafton County. It is run by Headrest and is certified with the New Hampshire Partnership for Recovery Residences.
A Men's Sober House on Church Street
The house sits on Church Street in downtown Lebanon, behind the fire station on the Green. That is about as central as an address gets in a small New England city, and it does specific work for a resident. The Green is the middle of everything Lebanon has: the shops and restaurants that hire, the bus stops, the library, the churches whose basements host meetings. A man without a car can hold a job and get to a meeting on foot, which is the single largest practical obstacle removed.
Recovery Housing Inside a Long-Standing Organization
Headrest is not primarily a housing operator. It is an Upper Valley organization built around crisis response and recovery support, and the house is one part of what it does. The stated purpose of the residence is straightforward: a safe, stable and comfortable place for men in recovery to call home. Housing that sits inside a larger organization brings a resident into contact with the rest of it, which in a rural region means a crisis line, peer support and referral relationships that a standalone house would have to build from nothing.
What Certification Establishes for This Recovery Residence
New Hampshire designates one agency to certify recovery residences, and this house is on its certified list. Certification obliges a residence to publish a code of ethics, to hand an applicant fees and house rules in writing before move-in, to keep a written relapse and discharge policy, and to answer to an outside complaint process. It also decides referral access, because the state's Voluntary Recovery House Registry admits only certified residences and publicly funded programs may refer only to registry houses. In a region with very few beds, being referable matters as much as being open.
Recovery Housing in Lebanon and the Upper Valley
Lebanon is the largest city in the Upper Valley and the service center for a wide rural area straddling the Connecticut River. Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center sits in the city and is the largest hospital in the state; the Lebanon District Court, the city's employers and the region's outpatient providers are all inside the same few miles, and Advance Transit runs free buses between Lebanon, Hanover, White River Junction and Norwich. Grafton County covers a large, thinly settled area with a handful of recovery beds in it, so a certified men's house in Lebanon serves a catchment that runs well up and down the river.
Applying to This Lebanon Sober House
Applications go through Headrest. The questions worth asking are the ones certification obliges answers to: what the fee covers and what assistance exists, whether a house manager lives on site, how bedrooms are assigned, what happens after a relapse, and whether medication for opioid use disorder is accepted. In a region this size, ask about the waiting list as well.
