Depression, Drug Addiction and Dual Diagnosis

Drug Addiction and Depression

There is always a reason for drug addiction. Addiction doesn’t exist in isolation, after all; it’s the product of causative conditions, evidence of an underlying disease that quite literally compels addicts to use drugs. In many instances, that underlying disease comes in the form of clinical depression…and so it is that the most successful drug rehabilitation programs are those which take full stuck of their patients’ mental health. To beat drug addiction, you’ve got to eradicate the roots of the thing. Anything short of comprehensive drug recovery just isn’t good enough.

The equation is a fairly simple one: Depression hurts. Drug use makes it feel better. Depression patients are prone to addiction because drug abuse, for them, constitutes a sort of self-medication, a mechanism by which to ease the ache that characterizes depression itself. With that in mind, it’s fair to say that a drug rehabilitation program which doesn’t address a patient’s underlying emotional wellness can’t achieve much of anything at all; an addict who checks out of a drug rehabilitation center with a lingering case of clinical depression is almost necessarily doomed to relapse. Effective drug rehabilitation is and can only be drug rehabilitation that helps you get all-the-way better.

The most adept drug rehabilitation plans, in this sense, are those that foster meaningful psychological recovery in drug rehabilitation patients ( dual diagnosis treatment ). To get better for good, a drug rehabilitation patient has got to develop new ways of relating to himself and the world; drug rehabilitation, when it works, works because it helps patients reformulate their personal notions of self-esteem and self-control. Obviously, such a reformulation can’t occur outside the context of intensive depression treatment. You can’t win the fight against drug addiction, you might say, without taking down depression in the process.

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