| Summary: | Therapeutic Community Approach (TC) knows the problem to exist within the person not in drugs. This approach also considers addiction as a disease that encompasses the whole personality of the addict; therefore, the problem that should be targeted is the addict not the drug. The main goal of treatment is to make changes in the attitudes, behavior, values and thoughts of the patient, to make them consistent with a healthy lifestyle and to reinforce their clean time.
Therapeutic community is a treatment protocol developed based on concepts and treatments relating to social learning, and issues of cognitivism, behaviorism, Gestalt psychology, humanism, and psychoanalysis; it can, therefore, create multi-dimensional changes in the drug abuser. In TC, recovery requires rehabilitation, relearning or re-establishment of abilities to make possible a positive life aimed at achievement of physical and emotional health.
While the number of patients admitted to TC may vary between 30 and 2000, clinical experience has shown that the number of 40-80 patients in the TC may have the best efficiency. Community in TC comprises the four basic components of social context, social expectations, social assessment and social feedback. TC period for patients consists of the five phases of orientation, treatment, pre-reentry, reentry and follow-up. Data analysis has shown TC to be an approach that helps people with problems of substance abuse and comorbid psychological disorders. Meanwhile, the results demonstrated the effectiveness of TC on mental symptoms including depression, paranoid thoughts, morbid symptoms, obsession-compulsion, aggressive crimes, criminal behavior, physical complaint, problem in social relationship, and anxiety disorder. As a result, therapeutic community interventions can be helpful for people with drug abuse and comorbid psychological disorders.
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