Why Does Addiction Treatment Not Work For Everyone?

Here’s a question: Why doesn’t drug treatment work for everyone? In an age of expert drug rehab programs and expensive drug treatment centers, why doesn’t every drug treatment patient get better? Put even more simply: Why is drug addiction so damn hard to beat?

Part of the answer lies in the mechanisms of drug addiction itself. 

 

Remember, drug addiction is a disease, and like all diseases, it has a knack for hanging in against even the most aggressive treatment plans. No drug rehab program, you might say, is sophisticated enough to make drug addiction anything other than what it is: a bear, a bull, an enemy that will never, under any circumstances, lay down and die.

 

But that’s not the whole story. There’s more to the failure of drug treatment that just the stubbornness of drug addiction: There’s got to be because so many drug addicts do get healthy in drug rehab, and so many patients do get healed at holistic treatment centers. So what gives, then?: What separates the success stories from everybody else?

Remember, drug treatment is ultimately a patient-driven process. 

Getting better means finding the right drug treatment center, of course…but getting better also means resolving to make that drug treatment center work for you, and committing yourself to the entire extent of the drug recovery process. Drug rehab can’t be useful, is the thing, unless you want it to be: Drug rehab can’t count for much of anything, in fact, unless you’re determined to make it so.

 

What that means, in plain terms, is that those patients who get better in drug rehab get better because they want to, and because they refuse not to. Let’s be clear about this much: Drug treatment isn’t easy. Drug recovery doesn’t just happen: Healing is a product of struggle, and strain, and the sort of drawn-out fight that you can’t win without the fiercest kind of resolve. Yes, those patients who get better in drug rehab get better because they want to…but wanting, in the context of drug rehab, isn’t merely a matter of wishing and hoping.

 

So what’s the rub in all this? If there’s a message here, let it be that drug rehab and drug treatment really can work if you commit yourself to them. As long as the road to sobriety might seem, the way is a passable one, and millions of people have traveled it successfully. But, again, the journey isn’t easy: It’s full of physical and psychological toll, and it will tax you, whoever you are, in ways you didn’t know you could ever be taxed. Still, though, the taxing is worth it, in the end, if for no other reason than that the alternative, well…

 

The alternative is too bleak to contemplate. If you’re here, you already know what’s broken. Let today be the day you decide to start making it better.