Women in Recovery: A Ground-Up Approach in Singapore

WICC2025 Presentation by Poh Wah Ang and Dr Ee Lyn Tan PhD, MPH (WICC2025-PID300)

Authors

Ang Poh Wah

President, Women in Recovery Association

Poh Wah graduated from the University of Auckland, New Zealand with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology in 1985. She served a 5-month internship with Daytop Village Therapeutic Community, at Swanlake, a drug rehabilitation facility in New York, US in 2001. She was awarded the National Council against Drug Abuse (NCADA) Merit Award (2001) for her 3-year stint in The Turning Point and the Singapore International Foundation (SIF) Special Commendation Award (2012) as project leader, overseeing training for Laotians in drug rehabilitation from 2006 to 2012. She has served on the Board of Women in Recovery as President for many years.

She has been a counsellor since 1991 and has helped more than 1000 drug addicts for the past 30 years. She specialises in individual and group drug counselling. She helped develop the Family Engagement protocol for PFS Family Care when it was established in 2009 and trained their volunteers involved in the family visitation of inmates related to the Angel Tree project.

She formulated a theoretical framework addressing the recovery needs of drug addicts and implemented a 1-year rehabilitative treatment programme for drug addicts in a residential setting. She held a supervisory role in helping recovering drug addicts to become operational staff in a residential setting. She has been involved in consultative training on a freelance basis with Social Service Institute, Prison Fellowship, Christian Counselling Services, Halfway Houses and Singapore Prison Service and other social service agencies (SSAs) on drug rehabilitation and re-integration matters since the 1990s.

Dr Ee Lyn Tan

Lead Researcher, Women in Recovery Association

Ee Lyn was a career journalist for 25 years. She spent most of that period in Hong Kong as a foreign correspondent for Reuters where she covered a wide spectrum of news beats. In 2009, she received an Asia Human Rights Press Award for an article on maternal mortality in Afghanistan, one in a series of articles she wrote in the war-torn country. In 2019, she wrote for The Straits Times in Singapore, where she delivered in-depth news pieces and commentaries.

Ee Lyn's research interests are in drug use and labour rights. For her master thesis (2009-2010), she researched on the use of psychotropic drugs in Hong Kong. Her PhD thesis (2014-2018) centred on the use of benzene in Chinese factories and its debilitating impact on migrant Chinese workers. In this qualitative study, she used interviews, focus groups and ethnography with victims of benzene poisoning and their family members. Between 2013 and 2018, she taught journalism and qualitative research at the National University of Singapore. She now teaches media and research courses at the Singapore University of Social Sciences.

In 2019, she began volunteering for Women In Recovery Association, a charity in Singapore for women who are former drug users. Ee Lyn heads WIRA's research efforts. She conducted a focus group discussion in 2019 with WIRA members to find out the challenges they faced and what services they needed. The project was aimed at helping WIRA enhance its services to women in recovery.

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