Mental Health and Substance Abuse Treatment

Mental health and substance abuse treatment consists of patients being persuaded, motivated, or involuntarily committed to addiction treatment. The main goal is to help stabilize the acute symptoms of the psychiatric illness and/or the drug or substance abuse disorder. Another important goal of mental health and substance abuse treatment is to motivate patients to continue treatment once the acute addiction crisis is stabilized or the involuntary commitment expires. Dealing with ambivalence regarding recovery, working through denial of one's drug addiction and mental illnesses or both, and becoming motivated for continued care are other important goals. This initial part of treatment usually takes several weeks, but for some patients it takes longer to become engaged in recovery and to stabilize from the acute effects of dual disorders.

The next step of mental health and substance abuse treatment is early drug addiction recovery. This involves learning to cope with desires to use chemicals, alcohol, cocaine, meth, or other drugs. It also teaches patients to avoid or cope with people, places, and things that represent high-risk addiction relapse factors. Mental health and substance abuse treatment roughly involves the first 3 months following stabilization. However, some patients take much longer in this phase because they do not comply with addiction rehab treatment, continue to abuse drugs, experience exacerbations of psychiatric symptoms, or experience serious psychosocial problems or crises.

The next stage of mental health and substance abuse treatment is continued addiction recovery. In this phase, patients continue working on issues from the previous phase as needed. In addition, patients learn to develop or improve coping skills to deal with intrapersonal and interpersonal issues. Examples of intrapersonal skills include coping with negative affects (anger, depression, emptiness, anxiety) and coping with maladaptive beliefs or thinking.

Outpatient Drug Treatment Programs

Outpatient addiction treatment gives prominence to group and individual counseling sessions in order to achieve results. Outpatient addiction treatment programs are available usually available during the day evenings, and weekends.

Outpatient addiction treatment is best suited for people with low level addictions in the beginning stages that may overcome their addiction by simply providing a supportive therapeutic environment.

Drug Rehab Programs For Adults Over 50

Seniors with drug addiction issues is a problem that is escalating in the United States, making drug rehab programs for the elderly of vital importance. Often lonely and without family members nearby, the elderly have a high rate of drug addiction that typically goes unnoticed and unattended to.

It is important to understand the special needs of a senior citizen before taking the step of selecting a drug rehab program. In some cases, there can be some serious problems specifically associated with addiction and senior citizens.

Drug rehab programs for the elderly are specifically designed to factor in the additional health issues that sometimes accompany seniors with long standing addiction problems entering treatment.