Multi Modality Drug Abuse Treatment Program for High Economic-Status Patients

• Main Author: Ockert, David M.
• Language: English
• Published: 1983
• Subjects: Social service; Mental health; Clinical psychology
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.7916/D8F76BND

This study was a pre-post, single group evaluation of a drug-abuse treatment program at a private psychiatric hospital located in the north eastern United States. Subjects consisted of 101 consecutive atypical patient admissions. They were predominantly white male professionals in their late twenties who earned almost $45,000 per year and had about two years of college. The data-base included patient information obtained using: The Addiction Severity Index (ASI), The Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale, The Beck Depression Scale, drug history variables and a natural support systems matrix. Seventy-four of the patients successfully completed the inpatient treatment protocol, 26 did not and 1 died. Subsequently, 51 entered the outpatient program. Telephone followups on the patients were carried out 3.5 months post discharge from the inpatient program; on these interviews the ASI was administered. At these followups 51 subjects were found to be readdicted, 46 were drug free and data for 4 were unobtainable. The relationships of social, psychological and biochemical factors to occurrence and severity of drug use at post-treatment followups were examined. The analytic strategy employed chi square, correlation, hierarchical multiple regression, and residualized change score analyses. The results indicated that the longer a patient remained in treatment the more likely he was to be drug free at followup, especially if the patient entered the outpatient program. Antecedent factors predicting longer length of stay in treatment were (1) strong economic support status and (2) the existence of a supportive conjugal dyad. Two other antecedent factors were directly related to incidence of readdiction and its severity at followup. First, the greater the degree of pre-treatment legal involvement the greater the probability and severity of post-treatment readdiction. Second, the type of pre-induction drug of abuse predicted post-treatment readdiction and severity--methadone being the greatest predictor followed in order by "speedball" (a mixture of heroin and cocaine), heroin and cocaine. Additionally, it was found that the subjects taking psychotropic medication during the inpatient and continuing into outpatient phase of treatment were the most likely to be drug-free at followup, especially for the high psychiatric severity patients.