What Is Dual Diagnosis?
If one problem wasn’t bad enough, some people get socked on the jaw with two. Dual diagnosis is a problem where a patient has a mental health disorder, such as anxiety or depression, but also suffers from a substance abuse or addiction as well. This comes about as the patient seeks to use one to fight the other, often making both problems worse in the process.
For example, someone with chronic anxiety might drink because they believe it calms their nerves. If they drink every time they get a little anxious, and connect that momentary ‘I feel better’ feeling to the drink, then they might develop an addiction to drink.
Dual diagnosis treatment in benton, ar is harder than treating one problem or the other, and we often take treatment plans from both psychotherapy and addiction rehab. We either attempt to focus on both problems at once, or look at the primary one. In the above example, if someone is constantly drinking to stop the symptoms of anxiety, then we will need to treat the anxiety first because it is causing the drinking.
Once the anxiety is gone, hopefully you won’t feel the need to drink and you can wean off of alcohol too. There’s also integrated treatment for dual diagnosis, where we attempt to treat both disorders and use one treatment to help aid the other. Both disorders are considered primary in this case, and it often improves results and engagement for patients.
If you are suffering from a dual diagnosis, don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can’t get treatment. Instead, use it to your advantage and kill two birds with one stone. After all with an addiction and a mental health problem gone, who knows what type of person you could become?