Co-occurring Disorders
Co-occurring mental health conditions and substance use disorders affect nearly 14 million Americans each year. Of those only 19% receive appropriate treatment, with the vast majority bounced among treatment systems with different and opposing treatment structures. Few treatment programs specialize in treating complex co- occurring disorders. Nationally, research continues to reveal that people with co-occurring disorders need a specialized form of treatment, referred to as integrated services.
Treatment systems for mental health and addiction have historically and continue to be separated systems of care. While many research studies have been performed on mental health and addictions separately, it has only been within recent years that studies have emerged on people who struggle with both conditions in tandem. This emerging research identifies that traditional separated systems of care not only alienate the consumer from treatment, but they also result in much poorer outcomes that those experienced by people with single disorders. More surprising, we are now learning from these studies that programs predominantly designed to treat a specific disorder are actually only capable of treating the minority of those in need � where, in fact, up to 65.5% of people with a substance dependence disorder had at least one mental disorder and 51% of people with a mental disorder had at least one substance abuse disorder . We are also increasingly learning that these poorer outcomes result as much from these separate and contradictory systems of care as from the diagnoses themselves � with people who have co-occurring conditions comprising the majority of the 10 percent of people using over 70 percent of the nation�s healthcare resources. There are now more than 14 million people in the U.S. with co-occurring substance abuse and mental health disorders.
