Post Title.

Writing in the NIDA journal Addiction Science and Clinical Practice, Alexandre B. Laudet challenges us to look at what it means if we do accept the premise that addiction is a chronic condition by suggesting that is this indeed the case we must assess success (or recovery)differently. Noting that previous assessment of treatment success has narrowly focused on abstinence from substances, Laudet proposes that "quality of life" must be considered in determining how much treatment has really helped an individual with a chronic condition.

This makes complete sense to me. In other words, it is hard to defend the idea that a miserable recovering person, regardless of how long he or she has been abstinent, represents a fully successful treatment outcome--or an individual who returns to criminal or abusive behavior, even if not using substances. The question, of course, is how to measure the construct "quality of life," and if it is solely from the perspective of the individual patient/client/addicted person, or if some external source has a say in this assessment.

On balance, however, the idea of adding a quality of life measure to the assessment of treatment outcome is another step in the right direction, it seems to me, of truly looking at substance use disorders as the chronic conditions they are, and not as the black-and-white, right-and-wrong conditions the so-called moral model has often dictated.

Be well....