Dual Diagnosis Drug Treatment

Common characteristics of Dual Diagnosis or Co-Occurring Disorders

According to experts in the field, a typical person with dual diagnosis or co-occurring disorder is likely to have the following characteristics and experiences:
• May be alienated and lack support from family and friends
• Won’t cooperate with their health care providers
• Is very emotional
• Is likely to have severe psychiatric symptoms
• May be homeless or moving frequently from one place of residence to another
• Is likely to relapse
• May be hospitalized or taken to accident and emergency departments reasonably often.
Issues for people with dual diagnosis or co-occurring disorders and their families

The lack of professional knowledge about dual diagnosis can be frustrating for those affected and their families. Common experiences may include:
• Health care providers may blame the client for being difficult and unresponsive to dual diagnosis treatment, rather than questioning whether the health care system is failing to provide effective treatments and support for people with dual diagnoses.
• If a dual diagnosis client first seeks treatment for drug abuse, the drug and alcohol workers may consider their mental illness as a secondary issue or side effect. Similarly, if they first seek treatment for their mental illness, then the mental health professionals may also consider their drug abuse as a secondary issue or side effect. The two problems are often not seen as interdependent and equally important.
• Specialist and early intervention treatments are often not available.
• Health care professionals may not involve the family in dual diagnosis treatment, even though the family is frequently much more familiar with the problems and experiences of the person with dual diagnosis.
The future of dual diagnosis treatment or co-occurring disorder treatment

Alcohol and drug services and mental health services are developing ways in which to respond to people with a dual diagnosis. Integrated service delivery and collaborative dual diagnosis treatment is becoming core business for most services.

Where in the past these disorders were treated separately, drug rehabs and dual diagnosis treatment programs now treat both disorders concurrently and are seeing much better results. Drug rehabs have made great strides in being able to correctly diagnose and integrate effective psychiatric care into the drug rehabs themselves. To locate drug rehabs that have proven to be effective in dual diagnosis treatment, please call the national dual diagnosis treatment helpline at 1-800-511-9225.

Things to remember
• A person with dual diagnosis is someone who has both a mental illness and a substance use problem.
• In many cases, it is hard to tell which problem came first; perhaps the mental illness prompted the person to abuse drugs, or else their drug problem pre-dated their mental illness.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 4:38 am and is filed under Dual Diagnosis Drug Treatment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.