What Is Therapeutic Community And How Is It Used When Treating Addictions?
As addictive disorders are among the most frequent health complications among the general population, it is normal that with the passing of decades and the consolidation of health sciences, various forms of treatment for them have emerged.
Some of these intervention strategies are based on very different approaches and paradigms, and others are very similar to each other because they propose variants of the same strategy; some are mutually exclusive, and others complement each other, each of them reaching where the other is not as effective. In any case, there is a plurality of techniques and approaches that health professionals trained in the treatment of addictions know well, regardless of whether they use them in their daily lives or not.
In this article We are going to focus on one of those proposals for the treatment of addictions: the therapeutic community. What is their effectiveness and how do they help patients?
Addictions constitute one of the most severe health problems, both from a quantitative point of view, due to the number of people who suffer from them, and from a qualitative point of view, due to their ability to affect people’s quality of life and the risk of causing death that they entail.
In this sense, addictions are difficult to overcome among other things because they are not a simple medical complication that arises from a specific part of the body. Addictive disorders are consolidated in the daily lives of addicted people, projecting beyond each of them as individual beings, affecting their way of interacting with the environment and the way in which they generate contexts around them.
For example, it has long been known that the friendship circles to which those suffering from addiction are exposed tend to help maintain the disease, because these social circles tend to be made up of people who suffer from the same type of problems.
The therapeutic community is based on this idea that social dynamics influence the evolution of an addiction, and takes advantage of the potential that these types of interactions have to reverse the health problem. If the social circles that addicted people tend to generate around them spontaneously reinforce and consolidate the addiction, applying scientific knowledge and therapeutic technologies based on behavior modification (i.e., psychotherapy) It is possible to achieve the opposite effect, weakening the habits and ways of thinking that keep the disorder alive..
Thus, the therapeutic community aims to create communities in which people act as elements that facilitate leaving addiction behind, helping each other and themselves directly and indirectly. They take place in forms of treatment based on admission to residential units in which several patients live together (supervised and assisted by health personnel), who participate in group therapy processes, support and motivate each other, and serve as an example for patients. the rest.
What is known about the effectiveness of the therapeutic community against addictions?
The research carried out to date on the effectiveness of the therapeutic community in the face of addictive disorders shows that it is a useful form of intervention with positive effects in the medium and long term. Specifically, the elements of this that help patients progress are the following.
1. Social incentives to progress
As in the therapeutic community The focus is on the progress achieved both individually and collectivelythere are constant stimuli to not lose sight of the objective of leaving behind drug dependence or addictive behavior.
2. Helps by offering behavioral guidelines
Patients gain knowledge about what to do about addiction both through the instructions and information given by professionals, and through the example of others.
3. A social context for relapse prevention is generated
Another beneficial aspect of the therapeutic community is that does not expose patients to situations in which the temptation to relapse may arisesomething key especially in the first phases of treatment (later prevention has more to do with self-regulation of emotions and behavior).
Are you looking for addiction treatment?
If you are looking for professional help to overcome an addiction, whether through drug addiction therapy or non-substance addiction therapy, we invite you to contact us.
In Llaurant la Llum We specialize in these types of disorders, and we offer health coverage from both medicine and psychiatry as well as psychotherapy. We work offering outpatient care in specific sessions and also through admissions in our fully equipped residential module.
