Your Rights, Your Recovery: Understanding How “Gold Sauce” Can Affect You

by Andi Daniel, Technology Coordinator

December 9, 2025

If you are on a path of behavioral health recovery, you know that your journey is about more than just feeling better—it is about getting your life back, making your own choices, and being treated with respect.

At its heart, behavioral health is a human rights issue. This means that how society treats people with mental health or substance use challenges shows how much it values dignity, fairness, and the right of every person to thrive.

We have posted other articles and podcasts about priority changes nationally. The emphasis on the “Gold Standard” of care is nothing more than pouring Gold Sauce on a problem to make it look pretty. The new priorities can sometimes interfere with the human rights that protect people in recovery. Here is a look at the rights you deserve and how some recent priorities might affect them.

Your Core Human Rights in Recovery

When we talk about human rights in behavioral health, we focus on a few key ideas:

1. The Right to Choose Your Own Path (Autonomy) You have the right to make decisions about your own body and your own care (autonomy). This means you should be able to:
   • Choose among different treatment options.
   • Say no to treatment within safe limits.
   • Receive clear, honest information so you can make informed choices.
   • Have your lived experience valued when decisions are made.
2. The Right to Fairness and Dignity You have the right to be treated with dignity and to be free from discrimination. Behavioral health challenges are part of the human condition, and they should never be treated as moral failings.
   • Care must be affordable, accessible, and culturally appropriate.
   • Stigma against mental illness or substance use should not stop you from getting housing, a job, or insurance.
3. The Right to Community You have the right to live fully in your community, not be isolated. Things like safe housing, income, and freedom from violence are essential for mental well-being. When you have stable housing, employment, and social networks, you heal better.

Where National Priorities Can Interfere with Your Rights

While working to decrease overdose deaths and increase treatment rates is important, some of the new priorities, designed to enforce specific standards, may clash with the rights outlined above:

1. Interfering with the Right to Choose (Autonomy)
   Your human right is to decide on your own care, and coercion (forcing you into something) should be minimized.
   • Gold Sauce Priority: Expanding Assisted Outpatient Treatment and Civil Commitment. This means they want to prioritize states that use or adopt their definition of “Gold Standards” to address individuals who are a "danger to themselves or others" by moving them into treatment centers through civil commitment or other legal means.
   • The Conflict: Promoting civil commitment and involuntary treatment can go against the rights-based focus on respecting your autonomy and minimizing the use of force.
2. Interfering with Health-First Approaches (Harm Reduction and Decriminalization)
   Human rights principles say substance use should be treated as a health condition, not a crime.
   • Gold Sauce Priority: Ending harm reduction practices. Claiming that outcomes based on the current practices are not “adequate” by Gold Sauce Standards. The Gold standard is to focus on treating substance use as a crime.
   • The Conflict: By rejecting harm reduction approaches and encouraging enforcement against drug use, the Gold Sauce interferes with the principle of supporting all paths to recovery and treating substance use as a health issue, not just a criminal one.
3. Interfering with the Right to Housing
   Human rights state that housing stability is a foundation for recovery.
   • Gold Sauce Priority: Ending support for ‘housing first’ policies. The suggested “Gold Standard” focuses on placing people in treatment instead of stable housing in an effort to ensure accountability and self-sufficiency.
   • The Conflict: Eliminating "housing first" policies challenges the idea that safe, affordable housing should be given as a right, since stability is necessary for mental health and recovery.
4. Interfering with Fairness for All (Equity)
   Your right to be free from discrimination means systems must actively fix unfairness based on race, identity, or group status.
   • Gold Sauce Priority: Eliminating anti-discrimination initiatives. Claiming that previous focus on health disparities for minority groups has not led to better health outcomes and may have "undermined core American values."
   • The Conflict: This shift interferes with the human rights requirement to address structural discrimination and ensure that marginalized groups (like communities of color or Indigenous people) have fair access to care.
5. Interfering with Specific Populations
   Rights-based care must be culturally competent and non-discriminatory toward all identities.
   • Gold Sauce Priority: Combating Gender Ideology. Eliminating support for programs that fund certain interventions for minors identifying as transgender claiming that the Gold Standard requires using sex-based definitions "rooted in biological truth."
   • The Conflict: This focus interferes with the human rights requirement for behavioral health care to be inclusive and non-discriminatory toward LGBTQ+ communities.

A rights-based recovery journey means you should be viewed as an active partner in your care, treated with dignity, and given the opportunity to live and thrive in your community. When policies promote forced treatments, reject necessary public health tools, or reduce support for fairness, they risk moving us away from these fundamental human rights.

Notebook LM and Chat GPT were used to synthesize this artcile.