When a young adult needs rehab, there can be many emotions going through their head. The first might be how did they get to the point? How did drugs or alcohol take hold of their life and become the only thing they care about?
Remember that an addiction is a disease. It is a medical condition just like any other illness. It can strike a person of any background and is not a sign that a person failed. The disease does not care if you are rich or poor, a boy or a girl, black or white.
While the disease can take hold of any person’s life, there are some people who are more at risk of falling victim to a substance abuse disorder. Those include people with mental health disorders. The two often go hand-in-hand and some programs look to treat both conditions.
Here are the basics on how that is done and how it can help you start on the road to recovery.
How Common Are Conditions?
Federal data found that nearly half of young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 in 2021, about 15.3 million people, reported that they had either a substance abuse disorder or a mental illness in the past year. That is higher than people in older age groups.
For all adults, about 82.5 million people had either a substance abuse disorder or a mental health condition. About 19.4 million reported that they had both, according to federal data.
So, if you suffer from a mental health condition or substance use addiction, know you are not alone. There are also plenty of people who want to help you get better.
What Is Dual-Diagnosis Care?
One way to treat a drug or alcohol addiction is through dual-diagnosis care. This is when counselors and medical professionals look to identify an underlying cause for the substance abuse disorder. Often that is mental health conditions. There are many different types of conditions such as anxiety, depression, bipolar, ADHD, schizophrenia and others that can contribute to a person’s addictions.
These conditions might make a person more vulnerable to drug or alcohol use as they look to ease the symptoms or treat themselves. It also might make it harder to break habits.
Dual-diagnosis care in young adult rehab looks to treat the addiction and the substance abuse. Staff can help you identify both conditions and triggers in the real world. They can also help develop skills so if these triggers happen, you don’t start using drugs or alcohol again.
In rehab it is important to treat both the mental health condition and the addiction because if one goes untreated, it can increase the risk of a relapse or a serious mental health episode.
Take Action Now!
If you are ready to treat your mental health condition and substance abuse disorder, reach out to our staff at Momentum today. They can talk to you about your situation and help decide if dual-diagnosis care in young adult rehab is the best treatment option.