The Substance Abuse Disorder and Mental Health Issues Essay

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Co-Occurring Disorder and the Substance Disorder

The concept of disorder in people has been a hard to grasp condition and psychiatrists often face various challenges in handling these patients since there is no single blueprint on how to handle the patients who walk into their offices. The co-occurring disorders effectively present an even more complex situation as the psychiatrist has to deal with the preceding disorder and the occurring disorder in order for the patient to be claimed to have fully recovered. With the high rates of recidivism this is a task that is very complicated and rarely achieved.

The statistics in the presented in the chapter speck volumes of the way the co-occurring disorder is being handled in the U.S. and even more so the related drug abuse statistics that are captured in various researches. One statistical piece that never presented a surprise in the read is the high number of people with substance use disorder who di not seek any kind of help for the same. According to the article, the national Institute on Drug Abuse in 2010 found out that 25 million Americans on estimation suffered the substance use disorder, but among these, only two mullion sought help, representing only 10%. In as much as the high number of drug abuse patients is shocking, the low number who sought help is not shocking since the society has presented several reasons and environments that facilitates this. First, the use of drugs has over the years gained acceptance such that people joke about it and do not view it as a serious disease hence the low number of people being referred to the hospitals or relevant places for medication. The society has also neglected those abusing drugs as outcasts whose fate is sealed hence are given no immediate help. The drug use culture prevalent among youth has also made it hard for those already addicted to see themselves as having a problem hence never seek medical attention.

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On the other hand, one statistical piece that stood out as an interesting fact is that there have been researches that have establish that among the individuals with co-occurring psychiatric as well as substance-related disorder, 90% of the time, the mental health disorders come before the individual starts suffering the substance use disorder. This has changed the presumption that I have always had that it is the excessive consumption of the drugs and reliance on their effect that leads to the alteration of the brain functionality and hence the mental health. This has come as a learning point especially for some dealing in counselling and rehabilitation of people living under drug addiction and influence.

Diagnosing a substance use disorder there are x11 steps that the DSM-5 outlines as a yardstick for determining if an individual has substance use disorder or not. However, it is not that the drug user must display all the 11 signs to be categorized as a person who suffers substance use disorder, but the individual but may display three or more dependence criteria within a 12-month period. The DSM-IV abuse gives the first four signs of an individual deemed to be abusing substance, then DSM-IV dependence gives the symptoms of an individual who has dependence on drugs problems, then DSM-5 gives a combination of these two as a diagnosis of an individual who then suffers from substance use disorder. These 11 criterion for the DSM-5 are;

1. Hazardous use

2. Social/interpersonal problems related to use

3. Neglected major roles to use….....

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