The first step may be to consider self-knowledge, truthfulness, and other building blocks on the road to personal growth. Explore the benefits of outpatient treatment and learn the importance of seeking professional help. Parenting an adult addict can be a painfully isolating experience if you allow stigma to keep you from seeking support.

Indeed, a prominent harm reduction psychotherapist and researcher, Rothschild, argues that the harm reduction approach represents a “third wave of addiction treatment” which follows, and is replacing, the moral and disease models (Rothschild, 2015a). A number of studies have examined psychosocial risk reduction interventions for individuals with high-risk drug use, especially people who inject drugs. In contrast to the holistic approach of harm reduction psychotherapy, risk reduction interventions are generally designed to target specific HIV risk behaviors (e.g., injection or sexual risk behaviors) without directly addressing mechanisms of SUD, and thus are quite limited in scope.

4. Consequences of abstinence-only treatment

Despite compatibility with harm reduction in established SUD treatment models such as MI and RP, there is a dearth of evidence testing these as standalone treatments for helping patients achieve nonabstinence goals; this is especially true regarding DUD (vs. AUD). In sum, the current body of literature reflects multiple well-studied nonabstinence approaches for treating AUD and exceedingly little research testing nonabstinence treatments for drug use problems, representing a notable gap in the literature. Multiple versions of harm reduction psychotherapy for alcohol and drug use have been described in detail but not yet studied empirically.

• Not least is developing adaptive ways for dealing with negative feelings and uncertainty.
• Good treatment programs recognize the relapse process and teach people workable exit strategies from such experiences.
• Therapy focuses on providing the individual the necessary skills to prevent a lapse from escalating into a relapse31.
• Using a wave metaphor, urge surfing is an imagery technique to help clients gain control over impulses to use drugs or alcohol.

Miller and Hester reviewed more than 500 alcoholism outcome studies and reported that more than 75% of subjects relapsed within 1 year of treatment1. A study published by Hunt and colleagues demonstrated that nicotine, heroin, and alcohol produced highly similar rates of relapse over a one-year period, in the range of 80-95%2. A significant proportion (40–80%) of patients receiving treatment for alcohol use disorders have at least one drink, a “lapse,” within the first year of after treatment, whereas around 20% of patients return to pre-treatment levels of alcohol use3.

Specific Intervention strategies in Relapse Prevention

High-risk situations are determined by an analysis of previous lapses and by reports of situations in which the client feels or felt “tempted.” Appropriate responses are those behaviours that lead to avoidance of high-risk situations, or behaviours that foster adaptive responses. Seemingly irrelevant decisions (SIDs) are those behaviours that are early in the path of decisions that place the client in a high-risk situation. For example, if the client understands that using alcohol in the day time triggers a binge, agreeing for a meeting in the afternoon in a restaurant that serves alcohol would be a SID5. Quite frankly, studies that have attempted to look at lapse and relapse rates across different substances have discrepant findings because the terms are often defined differently. In addition, many individuals in recovery consider a single slip as a full-blown relapse. An abstinence violation increases the likelihood that a single lapse will lead to a full relapse into negative behavioral or mental health symptoms if https://ecosoberhouse.com/s are present.

Thirty-two states now have legally authorized SSPs, a number which has doubled since 2014 (Fernández-Viña et al., 2020). Nonabstinence goals have become more widely accepted in SUD treatment in much of Europe, and evidence suggests that acceptance of controlled drinking has increased among U.S. treatment providers since the 1980s and 1990s (Rosenberg, Grant, & abstinence violation effect Davis, 2020). Importantly, there has also been increasing acceptance of non-abstinence outcomes as a metric for assessing treatment effectiveness in SUD research, even at the highest levels of scientific leadership (Volkow, 2020). Many advocates of harm reduction believe the SUD treatment field is at a turning point in acceptance of nonabstinence approaches.