Dual Diagnosis

There are cases where circumstances in an individual’s life can make their behaviors problematic that it greatly affects the life they live. Somehow, substance abuse could possibly be a byproduct 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. Individuals who experience a dual diagnosis 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. Not only is the individual affected by two separate illnesses, both illnesses interact with one another. The illnesses may intensify 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 more difficult.

There are a number of findings that is discovered to give explanation relationships . Causality theory suggests that certain kinds of substance abuse can causally lead to mental illness. Upon studying the causes of schizophrenia, it has been found that cannabis usage could causally develop schizophrenia. Moreover, the self-medication theory suggests that people with severe mental illness misuse substances in order to reduce a certain set of symptoms and counter the side-effects of antipsychotic medication. Some studies demonstrate that nicotine could be useful for reducing motor side-effects of antipsychotics. Similarly, the alleviation of dysphoria theory suggests that individuals with severe mental illness commonly feels bad about themselves and that this makes them vulnerable 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. An individual diagnosed with a mental disorder may be in denial about the drinking or substance abuse. The other way around could happen. The obvious substance abuse could hide the mental disorder. Therapists, psychiatrists, and professional counselors are having a hard time identifying both illnesses because psychiatric symptoms may be masked by alcohol or drug use. In addition, alcohol or drug use, or withdrawal from alcohol or other drugs can copy or give the manifestation of some psychiatric illnesses. Also, untreated chemical dependency 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 seemed that they do not understand how ineffective 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 keep on 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 bipolar. Consequently, it is very hard 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.