When people refer to substance abuse and dual diagnosis they are pointing to the fact that many people who are addicted to alcohol or drugs often have other mental health issues that need to be addressed. This is what a dual diagnosis means; if a person has an addiction as well as a problem like depression, schizophrenia, a personality disorder, or mood disorders then they have this co-morbidity problem.Having a dual diagnosis makes recovery more problematic, but it does not mean that a wonderful and full recovery is out of the question.
In the past many of those with a dual diagnosis would have been considered the ‘hopeless cases’ of the addiction recovery movement. Those who did manage to recover from their addiction were seen as people who struggled with recovery and might even be described as ‘dry drunks’. The fact was that their failure to do well with recovery was rarely seen as been due to substance abuse and dual diagnosis; in fact many people never even knew about this form of co-morbidity. In a lot of cases there unease was answered with the advice to try harder in recovery or wait for it to pass. For people with a dual diagnosis though, they only real thing that could help was treatment for their other condition. Luckily things are now changing and a lot more people are on the lookout for substance abuse and dual diagnosis.
The connection between substance abuse and dual diagnosis might have been established before or during; what is meant here is that some people begin to abuse drugs in an attempt to escape a mental health problem while others develop a mental health problem due to their addiction. Both paths to a dual diagnosis are equally destructive and they both lead to either treatment or death.
In the case of the person with the metal health difficulty arising first it will likely be due to their attempts to escape the mental unease that caused them to fall into addiction. They may have been aware of this other mental health issue or they may not; either way they will have soon realised that they felt a bit better about things and found life easier to manage when they had their favourite drink or drug on board. This may have worked relatively well for a while until addiction came along to spoil the party and leave the person with a substance abuse and dual diagnosis.
It is also frequently observed that addiction can become so severe that it not only begins to destroy the body but also to wreck havoc on the mind. This can eventually lead to the development of mental illness; this will be especially more likely to happen if the seeds for a mental health problem were already there.It doesn’t really matter which came first; the addiction or the other mental health problem. In most cases the person will be able to lead a happy and more useful life when the two conditions are treated and they enter recovery.
