World of Psychology
Getting Clean on Addiction Policy in the U.S.
I agree. Sheff diagnoses the nation’s response to addiction as being as sick as addiction itself. His message cuts across not only the policies of criminalization but the criminalization of an addict’s character.
While slamming prevention and treatment effectiveness, Sheff approaches the subject by methodically laying out the research. His own conclusions, reached through the experience of being an addict’s father, are in line with the reviewer’s and no doubt many readers. As Sussman puts it, the work is “a manifesto aimed at clinical professionals and policy makers,” as well as a good guide for both addicts and their loved ones.
“Addiction isn’t a criminal problem, but a health problem,” according to Sheff. Many clinicians are trying to get this message across to the public, to politicians, and to family. As with mental illness, the stigma attached to being an alcoholic or addict obliterates the ability for respectful, genuine communication.
Sheff is known for his book “Beautiful Boy,” which outlined his despair over his son’s struggles. He set out to go one step further in “Clean,” actually “sprint[ing] through the research for every aspect (neuroscience, social science, psychology, law) of every stage (preventing early use, identifying abuse, detox, treating addiction, maintaining sobriety) of every drug problem.”
It would appear his work is not only an informed addition to the literature but a rightfully irritated plea for folks to “get it,” to see that drug addiction is a health problem, one that ultimately affects the brain as much as genetics, biology and the environment. For instance, only in recent years has it become more widely known that the drug-addicted brain undergoes actual structural changes that can be specified and studied and targeted with appropriate medicine.
Beyond its significant informational highlights, though, “Clean” is most importantly read as a call for change.
You can check out Sheff’s new book here.
Families Could Help More in Treatment, If HIPAA Allowed It
The quick, easy answer, of course, is the nation’s health insurance portability and accountability act (HIPAA). Physicians are able to share only certain information with the family unless the patient agrees to more. The problem is that the patient might be too elderly, addicted or mentally ill to cooperate or even understand what they are agreeing to (or simply stubborn).
Certainly individual civil liberties must be taken into consideration. This writer, in fact, is more than moderately liberal.
But there is a blurry but significant line that puts human wisdom to the test, as we evaluate true need for family assistance.
Beyond HIPAA’s ramifications, there are doctors who frankly don’t care to communicate with anyone other than the patient, no matter who they are allowed to talk to. As well, many estranged families may not be interested in the health of their kin.
But for those families of the mentally ill, alcoholic or addicted who want to help their loved one, they need to be able to communicate with clinicians, doctors, and therapists. Rather than just informing the treatment team of a loved one’s behaviors at home and not receiving a treatment team response, the family must be brought into the fold of treatment teams. In the wake of the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. in December 2012, nothing less is required.
HIPAA needs to be reworked. There needs to be an out clause granted to family members who obviously 1) are intelligently trying to work on their own coping strategies in a troubled family dynamic; 2) care about their ill family member; and 3) can offer the most significant information about the patient because of a shared living situation or close interaction.
Lloyd Sederer, MD, medical director of the New York State Office of Mental Health and adjunct professor at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, wrote a few weeks after the Newtown tragedy of families being the true first responders of psychiatric illness. How very true. And yet how shabbily they have been treated.
Anyone who has been around the block with a relative suffering from mental illness or related concerns — even those empowered with the great help of the National Alliance on Mental Illness and other advocacy organizations — knows how hard it still is dealing with treatment providers.
Who, after all, knows a patient’s symptoms better than the family who lives with someone exhibiting psychosis, neurosis, manipulative behaviors, or obsessive-compulsive mannerisms? Who directly witnesses what the patient may cleverly hide in a therapeutic session?
Should not symptoms drive treatment more than diagnosis? Symptoms, after all, are what delineate an individual as being functional, or not, in various scenarios. And should not families be given information on how to respond in ways that may actually help the patient?
Though there are so many more, these alone are perhaps the two most critical, simple means of understanding that families must demand to be brought into the fold, respected as harbingers of the most significant information about mentally ill and addicted loved ones who are suffering, for the most part, needlessly.
0 comments:
Post a Comment