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

These are the keys to the therapeutic community as a resource for treating addictions.

As addictive disorders are among the most frequent health complications among the general population, it is normal that over the decades and with the consolidation of the health sciences, various forms of treatment for them have emerged.

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 of them reaching where the other is not as effective. In any case, there is a plurality of techniques and approaches that health professionals trained in addiction treatment are well aware of, regardless of whether they use them in their day-to-day work or not.

In this article we are going to focus on one of these approaches to addiction treatment: the therapeutic community.What is their effectiveness and how do they help patients?

What is the therapeutic community?

Addictions constitute one of the most severe health problems, both from a quantitative point of view, because of the number of people who suffer from them, and from a qualitative point of view, because of their capacity to affect people's quality of life and because of the risk of causing death that they entail.

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

For example, it has long been known that the friendship circles to which those suffering from addiction are exposed often help to maintain the disease, because these social circles tend to be composed of people suffering from the same type of problems.

The therapeutic community builds on this idea that social dynamics influence the evolution of an addiction, and harnesses the potential that these kinds of interactions have to reverse the health problem. If the social circles that addicted people are accustomed to generate around them spontaneously reinforce and consolidate the addiction, by applying scientific knowledge and therapeutic technologies based on behavior modification (i.e. psychotherapy) it is possible to achieve the opposite effect, 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 indirectly. They take place in forms of treatment based on admission to residential units in which several patients live together (supervised and assisted by health personnel), who participate in group therapy processes, support and motivate each other, and serve as an example for others.

What is known about the effectiveness of the therapeutic community for addictions?

Research conducted so far on the efficacy of the therapeutic community for addictive disorders shows that it is a useful form of intervention with positive effects in the medium and long term. Specifically, the elements of it that help patients to progress are the following.

1. Social incentives to progress

As in the therapeutic community the focus is on the progress made both individually and collectivelyIn the therapeutic community, there is constant encouragement not to lose sight of the goal of leaving drug dependence or addictive behavior behind.

2. Help by offering behavioral guidelines

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

3. A social context of relapse prevention is generated.

Another of the beneficial aspects of the therapeutic community is that it it does not expose patients to situations in which the temptation to relapse may arise, which is key, especially in the first few years of treatment.This is key especially in the early stages of treatment (later on, prevention has more to do with self-regulation of emotions and behavior).

Looking for addiction treatment?

If you are looking for professional help to overcome an addiction, either through drug addiction therapy or non-substance addiction therapy, we invite you to contact us.

At Llaurant la Llum we specialize in this type of disorders, and we offer health coverage both from medicine and psychiatry as well as from psychotherapy. We work offering outpatient care in occasional sessions and also through admissions in our fully equipped residential module.