Disorder Dismay

The latest trend in drug addiction diagnosis and treatment deals with co-occurring disorders, meaning an individual is said to have a substance abuse disorder and one or more mental disorders. These disorders can be located in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - Fourth Edition (DSM IV). An interesting point about the DSM is that new disorders are supposedly discovered and subsequently labeled as time goes by.
A few of the 41 most commonly diagnosed disorders include Separation Anxiety Disorder, of which a characteristic is persistent reluctance or refusal to go to school or elsewhere because of fear of separation, but that is common in most children at first. Another one is Histrionic (relating to actors, acting, or the theater) Personality Disorder, citing a symptom that an individual consistently uses physical appearance to draw attention to self. This appears to be most common in Hollywood.
There is also the Brief Psychotic Disorder, where the duration of an episode of the disturbance is at least 1 day but less than 1 month, with eventual full return to premorbid (morbid = relating to or characteristic of disease) level of functioning. It would be difficult to find someone that hasn’t experienced a state such as this.
The disorders listed in the DSM IV are supposed to be mental illnesses or diseases, yet many are common in society and one apparently can come and go in as little as one day.
As more money is being allocated through state and federal agencies for study and treatment of patients with a co-occurring disorder, more organizations are developing methods to address this new problem, coincidentally.
This activity begs the question of how do people develop co-occurring disorders?
Researchers have offered explanations for high prevalence rates of substance abuse disorders among individuals with mental disorders but the etiology (a branch of medical science concerned with the causes and origins of diseases) is not yet clear. As the guidelines for diagnosis and the wide range of symptom inclusiveness shows, this ideology has no hard facts and is based on subjective evaluations that intentionally complicate the matter when it is not necessary. Whether it’s called co-occurring disorder, dual diagnosis or comorbidity, most of the treatments for these disorders require psychotropic drugs. When and why did we as a nation start to spend more money on trends and concepts and less on actual results?
The more science and medicine focus on the chemical composition of human beings’ bodies and develop more drugs to treat symptoms, the more we as a nation are denying the innate abilities that people have to overcome fantastic obstacles with the human mind or spirit.
In the case of substance abuse, there are simple and extremely effective rehabilitation strategies that don’t use drugs to treat individuals or subjectively evaluate people. One such program is called the Narconon® Drug Rehabilitation and Education Program, which uses drug-free methodology developed by L. Ron Hubbard, who spent decades researching effective solutions to drug and alcohol addiction.

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