Quality Addiction Treatment

I touched on this subject in a recent blog, but it needs more attention. There was a lot of progress in the addiction treatment field the 80s. Quality addiction treatment could be easily found and accessed. Most treatment centers concentrated on alcoholism treatment, but cocaine became a major problem and so did drugs like Valium — treatment centers reacted to the new drug problems. Inpatient addiction treatment became costly, though, and too many treatment centers weren’t willing to innovate and find less costly forms of treatment, so managed care came along and enforced efficiency in the healthcare field.

There was a period adjustment throughout the 90s and into the 21st century from mainly inpatient addiction treatment to mainly outpatient addiction treatment. Many professionals insisted that individual counseling was sufficient. This created a situation where individual therapists who dealt with mainly deal stress, anxiety, relationships, etc, started advertising addiction (substance abuse) counseling. In some cases individual counseling is all that’s needed, but the trend to individual counseling caused a shortage of trained and experience addiction treatment professionals.

There’s special knowledge and set of skills associated with addiction treatment, and it takes years of experience working in the addiction field to really understand the problem and to learn the best methods to treat addiction. Addiction treatment is more effective with a combination of group therapy and individual counseling. I don’t know how many clients have told me how they conned their therapist in individual sessions once a week for an hour and hid from the therapist the severity of their addiction. In a group of other individuals who are recovering from addiction it’s hard to cover up the truth, because the group members will see through it and confront the person playing games. It takes specialized training and knowledge for a professional to become proficient at facilitating group therapy.

There just aren’t that many young people coming out of college who want to specialize in addiction treatment, so addiction treatment suffers from quality inconsistency . Most people don’t think that addiction affects them personally so there’s no urgency to push for better treatment for addiction — most people will say it’s the addicted person’s fault and they should just buck up and stop this crazy behavior. Addiction is something that creates changes in the brain, and it’s not as easy as just saying no. Also addiction affects everyone who buys health insurance or care insurance. Most families are eventually touched by addiction in one way or another. It’s time to pay attention to treatment — it will help us all.