Most people, even professionals, do not quite properly know what rehabilitation means. The meaning of the term ‘to rehabilitate someone’ means to bring someone back to a normal state of living. This is the basic meaning of the term. When spoken in the context of drug rehabilitation, it means to bring someone back to an addiction-free life after being ripped apart by the drug addiction. Hence, when a person is going for a drug rehabilitation program, what the person must really look forward to is getting a meaningful and constructive life back again.
The drug rehabilitation program is different in different parts of the world. Even among the fifty states of America, there are vast differences in the way this program is conducted. But though the execution of the program might be different from one state to another, what doesn’t chance is the fact that the program tries to bring the person completely out of the addiction and back to a sober life.
Despite the differences in the subtleties of the implementation, the main phases of the program do remain the same. The following are the four main phases of a drug rehabilitation program as implemented in the United States.
A Preliminary Assessment of the Patient
(We will call drug addicts ‘patients’ here because it is a more respectful word and definitely drug addiction is a psychiatric illness just as schizophrenia or Alzheimer’s are.)
The drug rehabilitation program will begin with first understanding what the condition of the patient is. There will be various tests conducted on the patient in order to understand if they have some physical complication with them. The presence of a chronic disorder can alter the progress of the treatment drastically. Similarly, they will be spoken to by psychoanalysts to understand if they have a mental vulnerability. This could be an illness that can come in the way of their addiction treatment by not letting them overcome the urge, for one thing. Or it could be an emotional issue that might be working on their mind and keeping them within the addiction. These situations need to be analyzed before the person’s treatment can begin.
The Intervention
It is not necessary that everyone who gets into a drug rehabilitation program will be quite ready to go through the treatment itself. They might have been forcibly brought into the program or they might even have developed a refusal of the treatment after being introduced into it. These are the situations when an intervention will be needed by the rehab authorities so that they can convince the patient to go through the treatment. This will not be an easy process, and in most cases, the treatment centers will involve the families of the patient for the motivation. One thing is sure though, As long as the patient is not completely brought out of the intervention, the treatment program will have no meaning.
The Detoxification Process
People who come into drug rehabilitation programs are definitely in severe conditions of addiction. That is why these people will need severe treatment methods too. A detoxification becomes quite necessary. Detoxifying a patient means to remove the accumulated toxins from the body that might have collected due to the person’s addiction. It is important to remove these toxins because they can cause physical ailments later on in life and they will also not allow the person to come out of the habit for the substance effectively.
Detoxification is different for different kinds of addiction treatment. During this process, the patient will be invariably given some kind of medication that is specific to the kind of drug that the person is addicted to Like, if the person is addicted to heroin, they may be provided methadone or buprenorphine. The intention here is to allay the person’s urges for the substance.
The length of the detoxification part of the drug rehabilitation program will depend on the kind of the addiction the person is in and the extent of addictiveness the substance can cause. Based on this, the person can be in treatment for three to thirty days, getting completely detoxified from the substance of addiction.
The Aftercare Strategies
Aftercare is employed after the detox. The intention here is to help the patient completely come out of the urges for the substance. This program can go quite long, but the patient may be called in only a few times a week. The main aspects here are providing maintenance medication to the patient and training them on certain therapies, techniques and basic lifestyle changes that can help them look at complete recovery fro the addiction.