Watching a loved one suffer through addiction is testing and often leads to the dissemination of relationships and families. Every aspect of addiction aims to inflict harm, with the anxiety, anger, self-loathing, guilt and depression ferociously locked inside of one person. Becoming this loved one’s support system is an invitation for these components to permeate the lives of you and your family members even further. Although exhausting and difficult, conclusive research shows that coupling family psychotherapy with highly regulated medication regimens are the most successful in guiding your loved one to long-term sobriety. Families must be directly and intimately involved in the recovery process while their loved one is undergoing rehabilitation at an addiction treatment center.
Having a relative with an addiction in the family nucleus is challenging. When addiction is ailing a parent, it’s effectively eroding a pillar, a bread winner and a role model — or with a child, a future in jeopardy. These types of financial and emotional consequences affect the entire unit. Therefore, family sessions are not only productive for the parent or child patient, but also the spouse, the children and siblings. In these sessions, understanding the damage that addiction wreaks on the everyday life of the household helps foster repair and further unravels understanding of the underlying psychological issues that led to your family member’s pursuit of addictive substances in the first place. This approach, known as dual diagnosis, was pioneered by Dr. M.K. (Khal) El-Yousef in 1989 and has formed the backbone of Fairwinds Treatment Center’s services over the last 25 years. Dual diagnosis comprehends addiction as a complex disease triggered by one or more other mental health concerns.
Choosing addiction treatment centers privy to this compassionate and academic approach has proven difficult for many families. According to the Foundations Recovery Network, nearly 9 million Americans suffer from a combination of these dual-diagnosis co-occurring disorders and only 7.4 percent receive proper effective treatment. The indisputably close connection between mental health disorders and substance abuse are only recently being fully understood. Same experts say that exactly half of all patients with substance abuse addictions also overlap with having severe mental health disorders— if there were ten people in a room, all diagnosed with mental health disorders, five of them would also simultaneously suffer from some type of substance abuse. {is there a source you can cite for this claim}But while dual diagnosis implies one mental disorder working concurrently with one substance being abused, unfortunately there are some who arduously combat more than one on each side.
In Clearwater, Florida, Fairwinds Treatment Center has encapsulated this approach in its caring, sunny, modern facility. As experts in anxiety treatment, bipolar disorder treatment, drug addiction treatment, and one of the top eating disorder treatment centers in the country, Fairwinds uses the dual diagnosis approach to discover the psychological roots for physical self-harm. A top drug treatment center in Florida, Fairwinds reverses the intensely isolating experience your family member is undergoing by inviting the family back in.
