There are cases where circumstances in an individual’s life can make their behaviors problematic that it greatly affects the life they live. Somehow, substance abuse could possibly be a byproduct of a certain psychiatric disorder. A person afflicted with an anxiety disorder could also become dependent to oxycontin, which can give anyone the feeling of relaxation. Make sense?
Dual diagnosis is a term which means the co-occurrence of an illness in the mind and problems with substance abused. Individuals who experience a dual diagnosis often face a wide range of psychosocial issues and may experience multiple interacting illnesses. With dual diagnosis, both illnesses may affect the person physically, psychologically, socially, and spiritually. Not only is the individual affected by two separate illnesses, both illnesses interact with one another. The illnesses may aggravate each other and each disorder predisposes to relapse in the other disease. There are times where the symptoms can go beyond and even mask each other making diagnosis and treatment more difficult.
There are a number of findings that is discovered to clarify relationships . For one, the causality theory suggests that certain types of substance abuse can causally lead to mental illness. Upon studying the causes of schizophrenia, it has been found that cannabis usage could causally develop schizophrenia. Self-medication theory adds that individuals with severe mental illness misuse substances in order to ease a certain set of symptoms and counter the side-effects of antipsychotic medication. Certain studies illustrate that nicotine could be effective for decreasing motor side-effects of antipsychotics. Similarly, the alleviation of dysphoria theory suggests that individuals with severe mental illness commonly feels bad about themselves and that this makes them vulnerable to using psychoactive substances to alleviate these feelings.
The problem with dual diagnosis is that most often, only one of the two interacting illnesses is identified. Furthermore, the patient tends to be in denial with one of the illnesses. An individual diagnosed with a mental disorder may be in denial about the drinking or substance abuse. Or, the other way around could occur. The apparent substance abuse could mask the mental disorder. Therapists, psychiatrists, and professional counselors are having a difficult time identifying both illnesses because psychiatric symptoms may be covered up by alcohol or drug use. In addition, alcohol or drug use, or withdrawal from alcohol or other drugs can mimic or give the manifestation of some psychiatric illnesses. Also, untreated chemical addiction could contribute to a reoccurrence of psychiatric symptoms, and untreated psychiatric illness could contribute to an alcohol or drug relapse.
According to one alcoholic, specifically in America, the problem is that society- including the medical community and criminal justice system- do not accept and treat alcoholism as a real illness. Moreover, it seemed that they do not understand how ineffective it is to treat one illness but not the other. The tendency is that doctors may prescribe antidepressants to their patients without screening them for substance abuse. The addict/alcoholic whose depression is not treated will persist to fail at the attempt to get clean and sober. Those with depression whose substance abuse is not detected will get sicker because alcohol is a depressant and with every sip they are throwing gasoline on their simmering epression. Consequently, it is very hard for these people to come across appropriate treatment. Most substance-abuse centers do not accept people with serious psychiatric disorders and many psychiatric centers do not have the expertise with substance abuse.
Integration is the key to treat two disorders where collaborative decision-making procedure should happen between the therapy group and the patient.
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