Are there particular treatment approaches that seem to work best for people who have that dual diagnosis?
When you’re talking about treatment, there are really two major types of treatment. There is use of medications and then there are psychological treatments. If you’ve got a substance abuse problem and a particular psychiatric disorder that might be responsive to medications, then the medications that are used are the medications that would ordinarily be used to treat that psychiatric disorder. In terms of psychological treatments, there are a number of different models of dual diagnosis treatment and there has been a move in recent years toward what’s called integrated treatment. This approach tries to deal with both disorders simultaneously rather than having people receive substance abuse treatment in one setting and their mental health treatment in an entirely different setting. More often than not, these are outpatient programs. Inpatient programs are generally programs to help stabilize people. So they would help to stabilize psychiatric symptoms, to detoxify people and prepare pe
