Drug Rehab Mountainside alcoholism treatment center announces ground breaking approach to address Comorbidity

Mountainsides Advanced Nurse Practitioner has long advocated that treatment professionals pay close attention to the symptom overlap between the symptoms of depression and withdrawal symptoms from alcohol and many drugs of abuse.  This overlap can make the diagnosis difficult and, many professionals, not used to working with substance abuse disorders, are often too quick to disregard the psychiatric component.

Our Advanced Nurse Practitioner has been working closely with our Psychiatrist who also has a background and specialization in addiction treatment. Through increased awareness and years of experience with psychiatric and substance abusive disorders, our treatment programs for drug and alcohol addiction have been strengthened.

We challenge the conventional wisdom of not addressing the underlying issues until several months of sobriety. We Treat the substance abuse disorder and psychiatric disorders concurrently.

Please visit Mountainsides website http://www.mountainside.org/drug-rehab to learn more. Or give Mountainside a call at 800-762-5433.

This recent economic downturn has shown a renewed light on the services of Mountainside Drug Rehab. For more information on the acclaimed treatment program at Mountainside www.mountainside.org in CT or to schedule an admission, please call 800.762.5433.

You may also find some of the information below helpful:

Comorbidity is a topic that our stakeholders–patients, family members, health care professionals and others– frequently ask about. It is also a topic about which we have insufficient information, and so it remains a research priority for NIDA. This Research Report provides information on the state of the science in this area. And although a variety of diseases commonly co-occur with drug abuse and addiction (e.g. HIV, hepatitis C, cancer, cardiovascular disease), this report focuses only on the comorbidity of drug use disorders and other mental illnesses.

 To help explain this comorbidity, we need to first recognize that drug addiction is a mental illness. It is a complex brain disease characterized by compulsive, at times uncontrollable drug craving, seeking, and use despite devastating consequences– behaviors that stem from drug-induced changes in brain structure and function. These changes occur in some of the same brain areas that are disrupted in various other mental disorders, such as depression, anxiety, or schizophrenia. It is therefore not surprising that population surveys show a high rate of co-occurrence, or comorbidity, between drug addiction and other mental illnesses. Even though we cannot always prove a connection or causality, we do know that certain mental disorders are established risk factors for subsequent drug abuse– and vice versa.