What Are Co-occurring Disorders?

Co-occurring disorders are relatively new with regards to the vernacular of treating people with an addiction. even though it is quite common for people who have studied human behavior. Most individuals do not have one particular component of a mental illness. Often time, people have components of anxiety and depressions, sometimes PTSD is a component of that. But we hath a co-occurring addiction is often times the addiction or the presenting problem of an addiction is masking an underlying condition. So what has to occur if you have to be able to treat the cause of the addiction which may be anxiety, depression, or whatever the mental illnesses are that is being medicated with the use of an addiction while at the same time treating the addiction. So both of them – the occurring and mental illness along with the substance abuse – must be treated simultaneously. While one decreases, the other may increase, If increase the dependence on a medication – the anxiety or depression may increase. So what you have to do is treat the co-occurring disorders so that both are decreasing simultaneously.

How Does ATS Treat Co-Occurring Disorders?

Our primary mission is to keep people alive. Drugs that people are using are extremely lethal. Obviously, heroin mixed with fentanyl or heroin mixed with lidocaine or heroin in doses that are not controlled by the person who is manufacturing the heroine is an extremely lethal drug. So, our primary mission is to keep people alive, first and foremost, while at the same time identifying some of those issues that may have caused the use of an addiction in the first place. We start looking at age of onset, when did someone start using something. In this particular case, our statistics indicate that our patients started using something around 12-14. Consequently, brain development at that time took on a totally different twist where a person develops a dependency on a substance or substances. At that time it is typically alcohol or marijuana. This then leads to something else. So we need to be able to treat both of them at the same time. Both substance abuse problems and something with regards to the mental health issue should be treated simultaneously.

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