There are cases where circumstances in an individual’s life can make their behaviors problematic that it greatly affects the life they live. There are instances where a certain drug addiction can be a resulting factor of a certain psychiatric disorder. A person afflicted with an anxiety disorder could also become addicted to oxycontin, which is able to give the person a relaxing feeling. Make sense?
Dual diagnosis is a term which means the co-occurrence of an illness in the mind and problems with substance abused. People who experience this phenomena often face a wide range of psychosocial issues and may experience multiple interacting illnesses. In dual diagnosis, both illnesses may affect the person physically, psychologically, socially, and spiritually. The two illnesses interact with one another. The illnesses may aggravate each other and each disorder predisposes to relapse in the other disease. At times the symptoms can go beyond and even mask each other making diagnosis and treatment very hard.
Several theories have been formulated to explain the relationship between psychiatric disorders and substance abuse problems. For one, the causality theory suggests that certain types of substance abuse can causally lead to mental illness. Findings on the origins of schizophrenia showed that it can also be a result of using cannabis. Moreover, the self-medication theory suggests that people with severe mental illness misuse substances in order to reduce a certain set of symptoms and counteract the side-effects of antipsychotic medication. Certain studies illustrate that nicotine could be useful for decreasing motor side-effects of antipsychotics. Similarly, the alleviation of dysphoria theory suggests that people 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. Moreove, 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 obvious substance abuse could mask the mental disorder. Therapists, psychiatrists, and professional counselors are having a hard time identifying both illnesses due to psychiatric symptoms can be covered up by alcohol or drug use. Furthermore, alcohol or drug use, or withdrawal from alcohol or other drugs can mimic or give the appearance of some psychiatric illnesses. Also, untreated chemical addiction could add to a reoccurrence of psychiatric symptoms, and untreated psychiatric illness could contribute to an alcohol or drug relapse.
One alcoholic from America shared that society can be a problem because alcoholism is not seen as an illness. Moreover, it looks like that they do not realize how useless 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 cured will continue 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 bipolar. Consequently, it is difficult for these people to find 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.
