Understanding Inpatient Treatment

Inpatient treatment provides residential medical and clinical care services for substance related problems. In many cases, this form of treatment involves a combination of both medication assisted treatments and psychotherapy.

What is Inpatient Drug Rehab?

Inpatient treatment is a type of addiction recovery services that is offered on a residential basis. This effectively means that you will be required to spend all your time - both during the day and at night - at the treatment center.

During this type of treatment, you will receive a wide variety of recovery services to help you overcome your physical and psychological dependence on drugs. These services typically come in the form of detoxification and rehabilitation.

In particular, inpatient drug rehabilitation programs will provide you with medical detoxification, addiction counseling and therapy, and psychological treatment. These services can go a long way in helping you overcome your addiction.

Additionally, these programs can help you create an aftercare plan. Through this plan, you can continue on the road to recovery after you check out of the inpatient treatment center. Aftercare is essential if you are to maintain your sobriety in the long term as well as reduce your risk of relapse.

Often, inpatient drug rehab facilities will have a highly supervised and structured environment. This could allow you to focus fully on your recovery without any pressure or distractions from the external environment.

Goals of Inpatient Treatment

There are certain goals that inpatient treatment will try to meet. When you enroll in such a program, you can expect to work towards the following goals:

a) Improved Health

When you enroll in an inpatient treatment program, it is highly likely that your health would have suffered as a result of your ongoing substance abuse. As a result, the program will try to help you improve your health and wellness. You can meet this goal after giving up your preferred intoxicating and mind altering substances.

b) Quit Drugs

The primary goal of addiction treatment in an inpatient drug rehab is to stop abusing drugs and drinking alcohol. You cannot meet any other goal unless you first quit using these intoxicating and mind altering substances.

This is because recovery is the main goal of any drug rehab program. Checking into an inpatient treatment center can help you achieve this goal. This is because the center will help you start making more positive interpersonal and personal changes in your life.

c) Psychological Well-Being

Finally, inpatient drug rehab will help you overcome all psychiatric disorders and other psychological problems that you may have over and above your addiction. After a prolonged period of substance abuse, it is highly likely that you might also develop additional psychiatric disorders and psychological trauma.

By enrolling in an inpatient treatment program, you can deal with all these co-occurring mental health disorders. Some facilities might also recommend that you enroll in another program to continue working through your mental recovery after going through their problem.

There are many other goals of inpatient treatment, including but not limited to:

• Establishing a positive support system
• Improving your personal circumstances
• Reducing your risk of engaging in criminal behavior
• Resolving any legal problems that you might have

Inpatient Treatment Programming

In many cases, residential treatment centers will help you meet these goals by creating highly personalized and individualized recovery programs for you. These programs could include:

1. Initial Assessment

When you first check into an inpatient treatment center, you will undergo intake assessment and evaluation. Over the first couple of hours, the staff at the facility will test your current condition as well as define the extent of your substance abuse and addiction.

Through this assessment, the inpatient drug rehab can create appropriate treatment programs and plans for you. As a formality, some of them might conduct drug testing, interviews, and medical history checking. All these services would be crucial in your assessment.

2. Medically Supervised Detoxification

After you have been through assessment, most standard inpatient treatment programs will ask that you undergo medically supervised detoxification. The goal of this process is to help you detox so that the drugs you used to abuse can leave your system.

During the detox process, the staff at the inpatient rehab center will monitor all your vital signals. This can ensure that you do not suffer any adverse, severe, or life-threatening withdrawal symptoms.

The facility might also prescribe medications to help you deal with these withdrawal symptoms and any drug cravings that might arise. Further, the program staff will continue monitoring your condition and ensuring that you achieve full stability. They can also provide you with emotional encouragement so that you do not give up on your recovery.

3. Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy, often provided in the form of counseling, would be the next stage in your inpatient treatment for addiction. It will be provided through group and individual sessions to deal with the emotional, behavioral, and psychological aspects of your substance abuse.

During these sessions, you can start discovering the various emotional and psychological factors that trigger your drug use and addiction. Psychotherapy can also help you learn new coping mechanisms so that you can deal with these triggers.

The main purpose of psychotherapy is to ensure that you start changing your psychological state. This way, you will have a higher likelihood of maintaining your sobriety and abstinence in the long term - even after checking out of the inpatient treatment center. It can also prevent your relapse in the future.

4. Medication Management

Also known as pharmacotherapy, medication management involves the prescription of certain medications to aid in the addiction recovery journey. The types of medications that you will receive will largely depend on the type(s) of addiction that you are dealing with.

Today, there are some medications that can help you overcome substance use disorders involving alcohol and opiates. For instance, there are maintenance therapies that are useful for opioid and opiate substitution. These therapies involve medications that can interrupt your physical dependence and reduce your drug cravings.

At other times, inpatient treatment centers can use anti-anxiety medications or antidepressants. These drugs are useful in dealing with mood disorders, which often tend to co-occur with substance use disorders.

The medications that you receive in an inpatient drug rehab program might be provided as part of your treatment module. Alternatively, they might be prescribed by the physician or psychiatrist who is on duty at the facility.

5. Others

The other services that you can expect to find at inpatient treatment centers include:

• Addiction education
• Aftercare planning
• Continued addiction counseling
• Involvement in support groups
• Referral to sober living facilities
• Relapse prevention education
• Support services

Overall, inpatient treatment is an intense form of addiction recovery that could prove useful in helping you overcome your substance use disorder and any other drug related problems that you might be struggling with.

CITATIONS

https://d14rmgtrwzf5a.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/675-principles-of-drug-addiction-treatment-a-research-based-guide-third-edition.pdf

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1046/j.1360-0443.91.12s1.8.x

https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/principles-drug-addiction-treatment-research-based-guide-third-edition/evidence-based-approaches-to-drug-addiction-treatment

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/substance_abuse_center/index.html

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2913125/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3357117/