Treatment
It can be very difficult to find appropriate treatment opportunities for these people. Many substance-abuse centers do not accept people with serious psychiatric conditions, and many psychiatric centers do not have expertise with substance abuse.
However, principles do exist for successful treatment of individuals with coexisting mental and substance-abuse disorders. Treatment of the two disorders should be integrated, not separate, and should be a collaborative decision-making process between the treatment team and the patient. Recovery needs to be viewed as a marathon, not as a sprint, and methods and outcome goals should be explicit. Although many patients may reject medications as antithetical to substance-abuse recovery and side effects, they can be useful to reduce paranoia, anxiety, and craving. Medications that have proven effective include opioid replacement therapies, such as lifelong maintenance on methadone or buprenorphine, to minimize risk of relapse, fatality, and legal trouble amongst opioid addicts, as well as helping with cravings, baclofen for alcoholics, opioid addicts, cocaine addicts, and amphetamine addicts, to help eliminate drug cravings, and clozapine, the first atypical antipsychotic, which appears to reduce illicit drug use amongst stimulant addicts. Clozapine can cause respiratory arrest when combined with alcohol, benzodiazepines, or opioids, so it is not recommended to use in these groups.
Read more about this topic: Dual Diagnosis
Famous quotes containing the word treatment:
“The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“Our treatment of both older people and children reflects the value we place on independence and autonomy. We do our best to make our children independent from birth. We leave them all alone in rooms with the lights out and tell them, “Go to sleep by yourselves.” And the old people we respect most are the ones who will fight for their independence, who would sooner starve to death than ask for help.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)