Evolving Addiction Treatment

This will wrap up this series of posts. Addiction treatment has changed in many ways, but in most ways certain recovery principles haven’t changed. Evolving addiction treatment has had mostly to do with medication-assisted treatment. Suboxone and Naltrexone are just a couple of medications that have changed addiction treatment. Every once in a while you’ll see an article claiming a cure to addiction has been found, but so far there is no cure.

The goal of addiction treatment is for the person to recover and live a normal, productive, healthy life. If new medications help that process then healthcare professionals should know about the medications. All new innovations are welcomed, but making changes based on a misunderstanding of addiction is dangerous. At NewDay, we believe that abstinence is necessary for recovery, but sometimes it’s a crooked road to abstinence. If, after treatment, a person continues to relapse periodically, but then gets back on track in recovery, then this can be seen as positive, since the damage from addiction has been minimized. If certain mediations help prevent relapse, then that’s an innovation – however, to give an addict the hope of returning to normal drug use is malpractice, I believe.

This is why it’s important to distinguish between drug misuse and addiction. I believe that many therapists, who aren’t trained specifically in addiction, mistake alcohol and other drug misuse with addiction — when they see clients who came to them because they were having problems and, say, depressed and drinking too much, and the clients improve after a couple of months and begin to drink responsible again, therapists might get the idea that addiction based on abstinence is too harsh and absolute. This is a dangerous conclusion if they’re basing it on alcohol/other drug misuse. I’ve counseled hundreds and hundreds of alcoholics who told me they had seen a therapist a few years back and told the therapist that their problem was a relationship problem, or a depression problem, or an anger problem, and then continued their addictive drug use after the end of therapy.

I believe it’s important for everyone in the healthcare field to at least have the capability of understanding signs and symptoms of addiction, and to make a reasonable distinction between addiction and misuse, or at least understand enough to know when refer the client to an addiction treatment specialist. The problem with addiction treatment, basically, is that not enough healthcare professionals understand addiction, and, sadly, even many who work specifically with addicts don’t have a good understanding due to lack of national standards and accepted definitions.

Hopefully this will change now that more people understand how pervasive addiction has become and how much damage it’s doing to our society.