Addressing Mental Illness, Chemical Dependency and Long-Term Homelessness

With continual evaluation and management, serious mental illness can be successfully treated and those who experience it can live productive, satisfying lives. However, left untreated, mental illness often prevents people from completing the day-to-day tasks that are essential to stability and productivity. Too often individuals with untreated, serious mental illness—especially those with limited resources and support—experience precarious family relationships, isolation, financial difficulties, violence, legal issues and long-term homelessness. Unfortunately these are problems that won’t just go away when a person finally does receive treatment.

Dual Diagnosis
Those whose mental illness co-occurs with substance abuse face even greater vulnerability. Drugs and alcohol can temporarily numb the pain of mental illness or provide an escape, but they often exacerbate the problem. As the problem gets worse, the sufferer turns to drugs and alcohol more frequently. For many this cycle fails to be broken by standard treatment approaches. Compartmentalizing interventions and treatments simply doesn’t work for the dually diagnosed.

As the American Society of Addiction Medicine reports it, “If the patient became abstinent in addiction treatment without treatment of the patient’s psychiatric disorder, relapse of the psychiatric disorder often resulted in relapse of the substance dependence. If the psychiatric disorder was treated without attention to the substance use disorder, the patient often failed to respond to psychiatric treatment."