One of the issues that anyone in self help recovery faces is how to gauge how successful that treatment is. You can look at treatment success statistics all day long and all they tell you is that for many people a program is successful. In reality, whether your treatment is successful or not is very difficult to gauge.
What is Treatment Success?
The first thing you should consider is what treatment success is to you. Everyone has a different idea of what success is. Some of these ideas are:
- Simply being off their drug of choice
- Getting their job or school work back on track
- Fixing their relationships with friends and family
- Staying off drugs for a specific length of time
- Being able to live a normal life without drugs
- Being in control again
- Resuming normal hobbies and activities
None of these things are measurable through statistics and charts. Success is a very personal feeling. It is also highly dependent on the goals and needs of the individual.
Relapse and Treatment Success
Some people measure treatment failure by whether they relapse or not. Unfortunately, this is not an accurate measure of success or failure. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, an addict has the same chance of relapse as any other chronic disease.
Relapse might mean that you need to change what you are doing but it does not mean failure. There are hundreds of reasons why you might relapse. Some of these reasons are:
- Stress
- Illness
- Being exposed to your triggers
- The treatment is not right for you
- You are allowing other things to interfere with your treatment
- You left treatment too soon
Gauging drug addiction treatment success is very difficult. There is no way to put a numerical value on the way that you think and feel. If you are accomplishing your goals then your drug treatment is working.
