How Inpatient Mental Health Rehab Helps with Addiction, Too
Advances in research and technology have given us an enlightened view that supports direct biophysical links between mental health and substance abuse. Addictions are no longer viewed as a simple matter of choice and/or willpower to cease the addictive behaviors. They are a complex interplay of physiological adaptations to the physical, psychological, emotional, environmental, and social influences that accumulate within the individual’s unique set of life experiences and circumstances.
Recognizing addiction as a chronic mental illness and treating it accordingly has opened up the many avenues that have long been suppressed. According to the NIDA, “Because drug abuse and addiction—both of which are mental disorders—often co-occur with other mental illnesses, patients presenting with one condition should be assessed for the other(s).” Inpatient mental health rehab helps with addiction in many different ways with increases in positive treatment outcomes and reduced recidivism.
Linking Mental Health with Addiction
Anxiety, depression, aggression, insomnia, suicide, and many behavioral and personality disorders can be linked to substance abuse. What many people don’t understand is the impact that co-occurring addiction and mental health disorders have in destabilizing the person’s natural abilities to cope with even the most basic life circumstances. Challenges and fearful thoughts over health or other consequences of addiction can become so devastating that every molehill seems to turn into a mountain. Eventually, it seems much easier to get lost in the effects of the substances to avoid negative realities.
As addiction progresses over time, the person loses their innate abilities to deal with stress, their self-will and confidence, and the ability to feel positive rewards. Drugs that make a person feel euphoric are major culprits that decrease functions in the reward circuitry of the brain while causing disruptions in stress and anti-stress motivating systems responsible for basic mental health stability. The ups and downs of intoxication and withdrawals, cravings, and the onslaught of aversive or abhorrent behaviors and consequences can leave a person totally broken inside.
Simultaneous Treatments
It’s not enough to say that addiction leads to neurological chaos and physical, psychological, and social ailments that exacerbate or cause mental health disorders. Mental health disorders are often the underlying causes of addiction and a “one size fits all” approach is not viable to any successful outcome. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness “Even people with the same diagnosis will have different experiences, needs, goals and objectives for treatment. ”
Inpatient mental health rehab helps with addiction too by treating the conditions simultaneously which offers the patient improved overall quality of life, increased productivity, less social dependency, disability, health and mental health care costs in the future, and decreases in early mortality including those from overdose and suicide. SAMHSA’s message is that “behavioral health is essential to overall health, prevention works, treatment is effective, and people can and do recover.”
24 Hour Support
Inpatient mental health rehab offers patients 24-hour support.
An inpatient mental health rehab helps with addiction by providing 24 hour support for both the anticipated and unexpected needs of the individual with relative expediency in treatment modifications when needed. By removing the obstacles of outside influences and having access to services around the clock, patients can remain focused on their recovery knowing that the clinical providers have their best interests at heart. Outcomes are more successful when the individual is able to identify their vulnerabilities and take actions to resolve them quickly.
Intensified Counseling and Psychotherapy
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, “Studies have found individual psychotherapy to be effective at improving symptoms in a wide array of mental illnesses, making it both a popular and versatile treatment. It can also be used for families, couples or groups.” Counseling and psychotherapy are the most common forms of addiction treatment as well.
Inpatient mental health rehab helps with addiction by providing intensified services that address the multiple needs of the individual, continuously encouraging and motivating them to remain engaged in the recovery process. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, “Psychotherapy helps people learn about their moods, thoughts, behaviors and how they influence their lives. They also provide ways to help restructure thinking and respond to stress and other conditions.”
Through structured guidance and behavioral therapies, individuals build lasting skills to cope emotional issues and the many internal and external environmental stressors that would cause them to relapse. Building trust, improving relationships, and increasing self-confidence goes a long way in establishing positive mental health.
Medical and Psychiatric Interventions
Inpatient mental health rehab can provide a high degree of access to professional medical and psychiatric interventions improving stability and abstinence. Bi-polar disorders, post-traumatic stress, and attention deficit disorders are common mental health disorders that increase addictive potentials in individuals. Anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, and suicide are often byproducts of the addiction.
Anti-psychotic, anti-anxiety, anti-depressants, and mood stabilizers are helpful medications in the treatment of mental health disorders that work by influencing brain chemicals and processes that regulate emotions and thought patterns. Combined with psychotherapy and access to medical care for impairments to physical health, these treatments can be most beneficial in helping the person obtain the objectives and goals of recovery while staying focused in the process.
Peer Support
Peer support in an inpatient mental health rehab helps with addiction by reducing the feelings of isolation these individuals often experience. Shame, guilt, and feelings of inadequacy or hopelessness abounds in those with addiction and mental health disorders. Members of a peer support network help to sustain each other as they share similar interests and frustrations in their efforts to get well. Sometimes, these are the most open, honest, educational, and trustworthy relationships that individuals can count on.