Addiction therapy aims to help patients deal with alcoholism, drug addiction and shopaholism. In fact, all addictions can be treated, but the question remains: what is addiction therapy? What to do when we would like to benefit from addiction therapy and do patients have to bear the costs of treating their addiction on their own?
Addiction therapy is a very important form of therapy, especially nowadays. The modern world and the wide availability of various psychoactive substances pose a risk for people to develop various addictions. If you asked someone what the term addiction is associated with, the words alcoholism or drug addiction would probably be the answer. In reality, however, people can actually get addicted to… anything. After all, there is a known problem of drug addiction, but also of shopaholism or pathological gambling.
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Addictions are a problem for both the person experiencing them and the whole environment. As an example, one can mention alcoholism, which negatively affects both human somatic health (according to statistics, in untreated alcoholics, the average life expectancy is shorter by as much as 10-15 years compared to the general population), but alcohol consumption in excess can have a negative impact. on the patient’s psyche (it is possible to develop at least various alcoholic psychoses).
Certainly, addictions can be treated as problems that simply need to be treated in the world. Addiction therapy, however, can be a topic that raises a lot of controversy: some people criticize it because they doubt its effectiveness. Some addicts, in turn, are afraid of treating their addiction because of the fear of staying in a closed facility for several weeks, away from their surroundings. Addiction therapy, however, is actually many different interactions, around which – completely unnecessarily – many myths have arisen, due to which methods of fighting addiction completely unnecessarily arouse fear in patients in need.
Addiction therapy: what is it about?
Addiction treatment basically has one goal: to free the patient from the factor that made him addicted. After undergoing therapy, the patient is expected to stop using a given psychoactive substance or practice a given behavior (or that the frequency of these phenomena will at least decrease significantly), but there are various other goals of addiction therapy. This process is supposed to reduce the harmful effects of the patient’s addiction and enable him to return to normal functioning in society.
Addiction therapy is based on various psychotherapeutic interactions. Sometimes patients are actually given some kind of pharmacological treatment, but in the treatment of addiction it plays an auxiliary role and is used, for example, when the patient is diagnosed with a clear mood disorder (antidepressants may then be prescribed). Numerous medical interactions can also be implemented in patients in the initial stage of addiction therapy – the so-called detox aims to eliminate the symptoms of physical addiction to psychoactive substances in the patient (detoxification is mainly used in the case of drug addiction and alcoholism).
Addiction therapy: what addictions can be treated?
Basically, the answer to the above question is simple: any addiction can be treated, which leads to patients, for example, problems in family life (e.g. resulting from spending all funds on buying alcohol or manifesting violence towards relatives) or in professional life. (related to, for example, neglect through the dependence of employee duties). Generally, it can be said that any addiction can be treated – most often alcohol and drug addicts go to therapy, although addiction therapy can also be used by people who develop:
- drug addiction (drug addiction – the most addictive drugs are mainly opioids, benzodiazepines, codeine and tramadol);
- pathological gambling;
- shopaholism;
- workaholism;
- sex addiction;
- Internet addiction.
There are also many other addictions that can (and often should be) treated. The course of treatment (including the duration of therapy) in the case of various addictions is different – it is hard to imagine, for example, that a patient addicted to shopping would be directed to detoxify the body. any type of addiction – for this reason, a person who decides to fight their addiction should carefully look for a facility where they can actually be treated.
