Prescription Drug Addiction, Programs and Treatment.

For a long time, addiction treatment professionals believed that mental illnesses like depression and anxiety were always caused by the drug or alcohol abuse. It seems to make sense that a lifestyle which revolves around substance addiction would cause a person to become anxious or depressed.

After years of suffering the negative consequences of drugs and alcohol, including damaged family relationships and living an unproductive life, who wouldn’t be upset? It was believed that as soon as the patients were done with the addiction treatment program and began turning their lives around, the psychological problems would disappear.However, this was often not the case. The patients may have had a renewed spirit for a short time, but the symptoms of the mental illness would quickly come back—and along with it, the addiction returned. Addicts would relapse because they were using drugs and alcohol to deal with their mental illness, just as they had been before the addiction treatment program. They would then go back to another rehab facility and get more treatment for their addiction, but they were still missing an important piece of the puzzle.

What we now know is that dual diagnosis is a real and significant problem. Individuals need help with both conditions to have the best chances for recovery. The reason why addicts with a mental illness relapse is not because simply because they are weak. A lot of the time, it is because they have not received treatment for their mental illness. Whether the drug and alcohol addiction led to the psychological problems or the other way around, they both need to be treated to prevent them from feeding off of each other in the future. Many rehab facilities now offer quality care for dual diagnosis patients, which provides concurrent treatment of both conditions.

Posted in: Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, Drug Recovery, Drug Treatment Program, addiction