What is the therapeutic community and how is it used in treating addictions?

As addictive disorders are among the most common health complications in the general population, it is normal for Over the decades and the consolidation of the health sciences, various forms of treatment have emerged for they.

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 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 they know well, regardless of whether they use them in their day to day or not.

In this article we are going to focus on one of those proposals for the treatment of addictions: the therapeutic community. How effective are they and how do they help patients?

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What is the therapeutic community?

Addictions constitute one of the most severe health problems, both from a quantitative point of view, due to the number of people who use them suffers, as from the qualitative, for its ability to affect the quality of life of people and for the risk of causing death that entail.

In this sense, addictions are difficult to overcome, among other things because they are not a simple medical complication that affects a specific part of the body. Addictive disorders are consolidated in the day to day of addicted people, projecting beyond each one of them as individual beings, affecting their way of interacting with the environment and the way they generate contexts around them.

For example, it has long been known that the friendship circles to which addiction sufferers are exposed often help. to 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 starts from this idea that social dynamics influence the evolution of a addiction, and takes advantage of the potential that these kinds of interactions have to reverse the problem of Health. If the social circles that addicted people tend to spontaneously generate around them reinforce and consolidate the addiction, applying scientific knowledge and therapeutic technologies based on behavior modification (i.e., psychotherapy) the opposite effect can be achieved by 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 hint. They take place in forms of treatment based on admission to residential units in which several patients coexist (supervised and assisted by health personnel), who participate in group therapy processes, support and motivate each other, and serve as an example to others.

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What is known about the efficacy of the therapeutic community against addictions?

The research carried out so far on the efficacy of the therapeutic community in the face of addictive disorders show that it is a useful form of intervention with positive effects in the medium and long term 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 progress made both individually and collectively, there are constant incentives to not lose sight of the goal of leaving drug dependence or addictive behavior behind.

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2. Help by offering behavioral guidelines

Patients gain knowledge about what to do about addiction both through the indications and information given by professionals, as well as through the example of others.

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3. A social context of 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 arise, something key especially in the early stages of treatment (later prevention has more to do with self-regulation of emotions and behavior).

Looking for addiction treatment?

If you are seeking professional help to overcome an addiction, either through drug therapy or through drug therapy non-substance addictions, we invite you to get in touch with us.

On 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 the admissions in our fully equipped residential module.