If a depressed person has addictions, can he go to rehab?

Very rare is the individual who enters rehab with nothing more than an addiction to drugs or alcohol. The average addiction sufferers brings with them a host of other personal issues when they enter treatment. It is the job of the addiction treatment center’s staff to figure out what personal issues are going to be relevant to a client’s addiction treatment program.

Any discussion about other personal problems is usually going to be focused on mental or emotional issues. People who are suffering from those kinds of conditions have a tendency to get involved with drugs and alcohol as a means of dealing with their other issues. What results is a set of addictions issues, which serve to make the individual’s life unbearable.

When an addiction sufferer makes the decision to seek help from a professional drug and alcohol treatment center, they do so with the expectation they will eventually leave rehab with a new lease on life. To make that happen, it’s incumbent on the rehab facility’s staff members to provide the right kinds and levels of treatment.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone to discover that a lot of addiction sufferers also deal with mental/emotional issues like depression and anxiety. It’s become so prevalent that many of the nation’s top rehab facilities are offering what experts refer to as dual diagnosis treatment. More about that later.

For now, we want to focus the following discussion on how the addiction treatment community as a whole deals with clients who are also dealing with depressions issues.

If a Depressed Person has Addictions, Can They Go to Rehab?

The answer to the titled question is yes, clients who are suffering from depression are always welcome to enter rehab as long as the primary reason they are coming in is for treatment of an addiction. As a word of caution, the fact they are welcome to get treatment for their addiction issues does not necessarily mean their depression issues will be included in the treatment process.

With that said, there are circumstances under which a client might need treatment for their depression at the same time they are getting treatment for their addiction. The circumstances under which this might happen are when the client’s depression has become intimately integrated with their addiction.

Here’s what we mean. There are many times when someone has a depression issue that leaves them living with unbearable sadness. If the sadness drives them to abuse drugs or alcohol to mask their horrible existence, the depression has become a proximate cause of the addiction. Likewise, there are circumstances where a normally healthy individual becomes severely depressed by the fact they find themselves living in the cycle of addiction. In such cases, the addiction has become the proximate cause of the depression.

When either of these circumstance come to light, the only way the client is going to benefit from treatment is if both coexisting conditions are treated simultaneously. Failure of the addiction treatment facility to provide this level of service will almost always lead to relapses for the applicable client. Why? The possibility of an untreated intermingled condition interfering with any progress made with the treated condition is very high. That’s the exact reason why the addiction treatment community has come to realize the importance of offering dual diagnosis treatment.

The real challenge for the rehab facility’s staff is to properly manage the dual diagnosis therapy process. If a facility has a therapist who is licensed to treat both addiction and mental health conditions, that’s the best possible solution for the client. Absent of someone with the requisite credentials, the rehab facility is going to have to designate two therapists to be responsible for treating a client with coexisting conditions. One therapist will have to deal with the mental health issue while the other one will deal with the addiction. From the client’s perspective, this will likely require a bit more time to get through the entire addiction treatment process.

Hopefully, you now understand that you still qualify for treatment even if you are suffering from depression. It’s only a matter of how treatment will be provided, which will ultimately come down to whether or not your depression and addiction issues are integrated with one another. If that be the case, we are proud to say we can offer you dual diagnosis treatment. We’ll make that decision once we have had an opportunity to assess your situation. For now, we would like you to call us at 833-820-2922 for more information about our facility and services.