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. An individual 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. With dual diagnosis, both illnesses may affect the person physically, psychologically, socially, and spiritually. The two illnesses interact with one another. The illnesses may exacerbate each other and each disorder predisposes to relapse in the other disease. There are times where the symptoms can overlap and even mask each other making diagnosis and treatment more difficult.
Several theories have been formulated to explain the relationship between psychiatric disorders and substance abuse problems. For one, the causality theory suggests that certain kinds of substance abuse may causally lead to mental illness. Findings on the origins of schizophrenia showed that it can also be a result of using cannabis. Self-medication theory adds that individuals 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 demonstrate that nicotine could be effective 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 susceptible to using psychoactive substances to alleviate these feelings.
Dual diagnosis presents a major problem because most of the time it is only one of the two interacting illnesses is identified. Moreove, the patient tends to be in denial with one of the illnesses. A person 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 hide the mental disorder. Therapists, psychiatrists, and professional counselors are having a difficult time identifying both illnesses because psychiatric symptoms can be masked by alcohol or drug use. In addition, alcohol or drug use, or withdrawal from alcohol or other drugs can imitate 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 realize how useless it is to treat one illness but not the other. Medical professionals have the tendency to prescribe antidepressants to their patients without screening them for substance abuse. The addict/alcoholic whose depression is not treated will persist to self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. 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 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.
Treatment of the two disorders should be integrated, not separate, and should be a collaborative decision-making process between the treatment team and the patient.
