How Effective Is Drug Addiction Treatment?

The aim of a truly successful course of drug addiction treatment is not just to get “clean,” but is to stay clean for the long term and enjoy a life free from substance abuse.

Over the duration of a course of addiction treatment at one of Rehab Clinics Group’s residential rehabs, you will reap the benefit of all manner of physical and psychological treatments which will help you to attain this.

Whether you are considering starting a professional addiction treatment for yourself, or whether you are just looking into the effectiveness of drug addiction treatment for a friend and/or loved one, then hopefully this page will help you to understand more about the intricacies of drug addiction treatment.

 

How Can You Measure The Effectiveness Of Drug Addiction Treatment?

It is important to keep in mind that there is so much more to overcoming substance abuse disorders than simply ridding the substances from your system and getting clean.

A lot of the hardest work that must be done on a course of addiction treatment is working towards an actionable and successful relapse prevention plan and helping you to start contributing meaningfully to society once more.

In accordance with NIDA (National Institute On Drug Abuse), for a course of drug addiction treatment to be considered effective, it must accomplish three crucial goals — on top of actually getting an individual clean. These three goals are:

 

• To help the individual to become a positive and productive part of their family.

• To enable the individual to contribute positively to a workplace environment.
• And to make sure that the individual is able to engage positively with the rest of society as a whole.

 

With this in mind, you cannot only consider how long a person abstains from drugs when it comes to working out the effectiveness of an addiction treatment programme, but how they engage with others and their own life after completing the programme.

A truly successful rehab should help those who are struggling to improve their overall quality of life, not simply their physiological dependency upon a substance — something which Rehab Clinics Group take particularly seriously.

As with other chronic diseases, which addiction is one of, addiction is something that must be managed for the long-term — and relapse is always a possibility.

Sadly, when a person succumbs to relapse, they consider that their addiction treatment may have been a failure and can feel the urge to completely give up on their recovery — but, this should not be the case.

Successful addiction treatment requires continual evaluation and modification depending upon the individual’s ever-changing circumstances.

Relapse should, therefore, if it occurs, be seen as informing the treatment provider that the individual’s treatment needs to be adjusted as necessary.

 

How Does Drug Addiction Treatment Work?

As mentioned earlier, there are a wide array of evidence-based ways to approach treating substance abuse. Some of the most common forms that drug treatment can take include behavioural therapies (for example cognitive behavioural therapy) or even prescribed medical therapies.

Often, a combination of different forms of treatment will also be administered. The specifics of the addiction treatment that individual experiences will most often be dependent upon their individual circumstances — taking into account such things as the type of addiction they are trying to overcome, the severity of their addiction, and their medical history.

 

Medication For Drug Addiction

It is quite common for some individuals to be prescribed medication to help them through parts of their drug addiction treatment.

Often, medication will be prescribed to a person when they are going through substance abuse withdrawal, as this can cause an individual to present with very severe side effects as their body adjusts to a state of being free from the substance that it has grown dependent upon.

Furthermore, some medications may be prescribed to help treat underlying conditions which are propagating the individual’s substance abuse — this might include mental health illnesses such as depression and/or anxiousness.

Additionally, some medication can be employed to help ease a person’s transition to a life of long-term sobriety. In some instances, methadone may be prescribed to people who are overcoming heroin addiction, or an addiction to opioids.

However, methadone is not always an appropriate course of action due to the fact that it can sometimes negatively interact with additional medication that an individual is taking simultaneously.

Also, methadone is not advised for women who are pregnant as it can mean that the baby may have to endure withdrawal symptoms after it has been born.

Modafinil (Provigil) may well also be prescribed to those overcoming substance abuse, with this medication specifically being prescribed to help those conquering cocaine addiction.

Alternately, this drug can also be used to promote wakefulness in individuals who are suffering from sleep disorders.

 

Therapy For Drug Addiction

Psychotherapy will form a large part of most addiction treatment, with both individual and group talking therapies being integral to establishing a new mindset post-rehab.

Behavioural therapies such as CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) and DBT (dialectical behavioural therapy) have been proven to be extremely effective at aiding a full recovery from substance abuse.

These behavioural therapies will help an individual to retrain the way that their brain works, as well as finding incredibly effective coping mechanisms to replace the individual’s tendency towards substance abuse when presented with stress in their life.

Talking therapies will help you to alter your old, negative behaviours, and this is something that a long-term recovery simply cannot be achieved without.

 

There Are Many Drug Addiction Treatment Options

In addition to the more conventional medical and psychotherapy-based approached to treating addiction, a lot more rehabs are now also implementing new-age treatments and holistic treatment approaches.

Some of these may include the likes of acupuncture, low-level laser therapy, family drug support, as well as workplace-based therapies. As we live in a modern age, it is important to implement successfully proven modern techniques into treatment plans alongside more traditional methods, something which Rehab Clinics Group have been doing for years now to unprecedented success.