Top 5 Benefits of Inpatient Psychiatric Treatment
Whether it be drugs or alcohol, chronic substance abuse exerts a tremendous toll on a person’s mental and physical well-being. After a certain point, users start to experience the damaging effects of chronic addiction in their daily lives.
While the physical effects of substance abuse can be debilitating, the psychological effects of drugs on the mind leave a person unable to cope the demands of everyday life. This inability to cope only works to encourage continued drug abuse practices.
Inpatient psychiatric treatment programs specialize in addressing the unique struggles and challenges brought on by chronic substance abuse. For anyone who’s had little success with traditional 30 or 60-day treatment programs, inpatient psychiatric treatment may well offer the level of care most needed to help you overcome addiction for good.
Inpatient Psychiatric Treatment
People in need of inpatient psychiatric treatment have reached a point where ongoing drug abuse has brought about serious destruction within their day-to-day lives. Without some form of intensive treatment care, a person becomes an increasing danger to him or herself and others.
Inpatient treatment programs, in general, provide 24-hour intensive care and monitoring to ensure patients receive the level and types of treatment that best address their recovery needs. Inpatient psychiatric treatment works in much the same way, with psychiatric-based personnel playing a central role in overseeing a person’s overall treatment plan.
According to the U. S. National Library of Medicine, inpatient psychiatric treatment programs employ a team of mental health professionals, with each care provider responsible for managing a particular aspect of a patient’s treatment plan. Team members include:
- Nutritionist
- Primary therapist
- Family therapist
- Psychiatrist
- Nursing care coordinator
- Specialty counselors, such as abuse and trauma specialists
- Psychiatric nursing staff
- General care nursing staff
Benefits of Inpatient Psychiatric Treatment
1. Individualized Treatment Planning
Drug abuse affects different people in different ways. Likewise, the number of addictive drugs on the market also poses its own sets of challenges in terms of how any one drug interacts with any one person’s physiology. For these reasons, inpatient psychiatric treatment programs place a heavy emphasis on the initial treatment planning stage.
Individualized treatment planning works to identify a patient’s treatment needs, be they medical, psychological or addiction-based. From there, inpatient psychiatric treatment programs use information gathered during the evaluation stage to determine what types of treatment interventions will be used during the course of a person’s stay.
While standard rehab programs do a good job at addressing addiction-related treatment needs, someone with a long history of drug abuse has likely developed any number of medical and/or psychological problems as a result of chronic drug abuse. Identifying and treating these resulting problems is essential to helping addicts overcome the effects of addiction in their lives.
2. Detox Treatment Provisions
Anyone who uses drugs or alcohol on a frequent basis will likely start to experience withdrawal effects on an increasingly frequent basis. The presence of withdrawal effects indicates a physical dependency has taken hold. Withdrawal effects play a pivotal role in driving the drug abuse cycle.
Once a person stops taking drugs (or drinking) altogether, withdrawal effects come on with a vengeance, making it all but impossible to maintain abstinence. Inpatient psychiatric treatment programs provide a range of detox treatment interventions, each of which works to help a person make it through this initial stage of recovery.
Detox treatment interventions used in inpatient psychiatric treatment include:
- Round the clock monitoring of symptoms
- Medication remedies
- Support group meetings
- Nutritional supports
Without these needed supports in place, it’s all but impossible for someone coming off a chronic drug problem to make it through the detox stage.
3. Medical Treatment Provisions
The effects of drugs on brain function accumulate over time, causing widespread chemical imbalances to develop throughout the brain and central nervous system. According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, months or years of chronic drug use all but “rewires” the brain’s chemical pathways, which ultimately works to alter brain structures over time.
Medical treatment is an important part of inpatient care.
Without some form of medication therapy, addicts face an incredibly difficult time trying to maintain abstinence in recovery. For these reasons, inpatient psychiatric treatment programs offer medication therapies designed to restore damaged brain chemical processes back to normal functioning levels.
4. Psychosocial Treatment Interventions
The brain chemical imbalances brought on by chronic substance abuse not only impair overall brain function, but also warp the brain’s reward system, the center that dictates a person’s belief systems, motivations and daily life priorities. These effects lie at the heart of addiction, driving addicts to center their lives around getting and using drugs.
Much of the time spent in inpatient psychiatric treatment involves helping addicts undo addiction’s effects and develop the type of mindset that supports long-term abstinence. Psychosocial treatment interventions commonly used in inpatient psychiatric treatment include:
- Individual psychotherapy
- Group therapy
- Drug counseling
- Drug education training
- 12 Step support group work
5. Treatment for Co-Occurring Disorders
The brain chemical imbalances brought on by chronic substance abuse greatly increase the likelihood a person will develop psychological problems, such as depression and/or anxiety disorders. Without proper treatment, a psychological disorder will only aggravate a person’s addiction problem. Inpatient psychiatric treatment programs provide treatment for co-occurring disorders as part of their overall treatment approach.
Considerations
It’s not uncommon for long-term drug users to enter and re-enter drug treatment, going through multiple rounds of treatment with little to no progress made towards recovery. Chronic drug abuse essentially changes a person’s overall character and mindset to the point where any sense of right and wrong takes a backseat to the addiction.
Without the needed level of treatment care, addicts continue to spiral out of control as addiction consumes every aspect of their lives. Inpatient psychiatric treatment programs use a comprehensive treatment approach designed to treat the worst of the worst when it comes to addiction’s effects in people’s lives. During the course of inpatient psychiatric treatment addicts develop a firm foundation in the recovery process, which is essential to ongoing success in recovery.