Substance-abuse rehabilitation - Definition and Overview

Substance-abuse rehabilitation is a process of medical and/or psychotherapeutic treatment, for dependency on psychoactive substances.

All of the following are typical objects of dependencies treated:

• alcohol,
• inhaled solvents,
• prescription drugs,
• over-the-counter drugs,
• so-called street drugs
• multiple substances from one or more of those groups, each a dependency of the same patient.

Frequent (but in no case universal) elements of such rehab are:

• Twelve-step programs,
• the doctrine that recovery is a permanent process without a culmination, whence the adjective "recovering" before "addict", "alcoholic", etc.
• the doctrine that addicts' attempts at moderation rather than complete abstention inevitably produces relapse (with the slogan "I don't want a drink, I want too many drinks.")

In any case, the intent is to enable the patient to cease their previous level of abuse, for the sake of avoiding its legal, social, and physical consequences, especially in extreme abuse; the controversies over seeking moderation or abstinence are almost entirely factual diagreements about whether moderation is achievable by persons with a history of abuse, not about the morality or harm of moderate use by those who practice it with apparent success.

See Also

• Drug rehabilitation