Dual Diagnosis Patients: Anxiety and Addiction – How to Beat a Dual Diagnosis and Feel Better!

Anxiety is the fear of a perceived future threat, and anxiety serves as a vital survival mechanism, an evolutionary leftover from times past when a few seconds of physiological forewarning to a physical threat meant the difference between life and death.

Yet when anxiety progresses to the point when the afflicted suffers near constant anxiety, or anxiety far out of proportion to a perceived threat, the condition becomes termed an anxiety disorder – a very difficult and painful disease of the mind.

Anxiety is tough enough on its own, yet problematically, anxiety disorders also put the afflicted at a greatly increased risk for addiction or alcoholism.

Anxiety can pervade to the point where the patient is willing to try anything that can offer even temporary symptoms relief. Intoxicating illicit drugs or alcohol work fast, are powerful and can transport the patient temporarily away from the difficulties of the mind, and as such present a very tempting form of escape.

But once the anxiety patient begins using drugs or alcohol as self medication, there is a real temptation and tendency to increase consumption; and when suffering severe anxiety, it can be very difficult to resist the lure of a bit of respite. Additionally, although drugs and alcohol offer some temporary betterment of anxiety symptoms, as the drugs wear off there is often a rebound increase in anxiety, an increase often answered by ever more drug or alcohol consumption.

It’s a slippery slope to addiction.

The Risks of Addiction

Drugs or alcohol are not an effective solution to symptoms of anxiety, and once the patient begins self medicating with any regularity, the risks of addiction and a dual diagnosis increase dramatically. The long term abuse of drug or alcohol always worsens the symptoms of the disease, and what was done to ease symptoms severity ends up just making things so much worse.

Once an addiction presents, treatment is necessary, and the sooner done the better.

Dual diagnosis patients respond well to conventional addiction treatment, but they must receive this treatment with corresponding treatment for the anxiety disorder. Treatment for either problem in isolation rarely works.

Medications for anxiety symptoms work, but they take time, and they don’t work well when the patient consumes illicit drugs or alcohol concurrently. For the best chance at success, the dual diagnosis patient needs a residential period of treatment. Treatment with therapies targeted at both the anxiety and the addiction, and with a treatment plan formulated to meet the individual needs of each patient, and developed in response to the relative severities of both the addiction and the anxiety.

In addition to conventional addictions therapies, anti depressants, anxiolitics and other pharmacological interventions can reduce the symptoms of anxiety, and therapies such as exposure or imagery therapy can teach the patient better coping skills to deal with triggers to anxiety.

A period of residential treatment can also offer helpful social interaction and modeling, better health through exercise and diet, and the inspiration that always comes from a group recovery situation.

Treatment works and recovery is very possible.

It’s completely understandable that anxiety patients turn to drugs or alcohol for symptoms relief, and yet it’s also completely imperative that loved ones intervene once substance use becomes addiction. Drugs or alcohol are never an appropriate solution to a mental health challenge.

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