Differences Between Substance Abuse, Dependence, & Addiction

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 17% of U.S. adults binge drink. Moreover, in 2021, alcohol-impaired driving fatalities accounted for 13,384 (roughly a third) of all motor vehicular deaths. And 40% of violent crimes such as assault, homicide and domestic abuse, were committed by people who had high blood alcohol content at the time of their arrests. Those with mild to moderate symptoms may receive treatment in an outpatient setting. You should ask a loved one to stay with you during this process, and you may need to visit a clinician for daily monitoring. Research has shown that the terminology used does, in fact, influence how people with a substance use disorder view themselves as well as how others view them.

Clinical Diagnosis

For example, a person may drink alcohol when they feel stressed but otherwise feel no compulsion to drink. But because the body has adapted to its presence, a person may experience negative effects if they lower the dosage or stop taking it altogether. It occurs when a person has difficulty stopping substance use or engaging in a behavior that provides some type of benefit. In this article, we look at the differences between addiction and dependence and explore definitions, examples, and differences in treatment.

Detox Programs

• Public health specialists have therefore asserted that it’s time for a national dialogue about substance misuse of all drugs, legal and illegal, and that this discussion should include alcohol.
• The World Health Organization also wanted to replace the medical designation of “addiction” with the word “dependence” back in 1964 (which probably contributed to the confusion).
• By Buddy TBuddy T is a writer and founding member of the Online Al-Anon Outreach Committee with decades of experience writing about alcoholism.

Given the wide variability in the interventions performed, it was not possible to unify all of the studies under a single intervention variable. In addition, these studies included numerous other potential predictors of treatment outcomes (treatment addiction vs dependence duration, follow-up period, and outcome variables), which were also heterogenous among these studies. In short, due to the clinical and methodological heterogeneity, a metanalytic synthesis would have been an inappropriate study design.

Meth Addiction, Anxiety, and Co-Occurring Disorders

Two RCTs found that gender was not a predictor of cocaine use at six months posttreatment [22, 24]. Interestingly, [22] observed significant differences between genders in the transition from abstinence to cocaine use, with men transitioning nearly two times as fast as women. In other words, women who use cocaine are more likely to keep using it while women who are abstinent are more likely to remain abstinent. By contrast, men who are abstinent are at higher risk of switching back to cocaine use and vice versa [22].

Unlike other illicit substances such as opioids, there is no specific pharmacological treatment for cocaine, which emphasizes the use of psychosocial treatments in addressing this condition [2, 3]. However, psychosocial approaches still present high dropout and relapse rates, thus, there is a pressing need to understand which variables influence treatment outcomes. For this reason, it is important to continue improving psychosocial interventions to reduce the chronicity of the disorder. Contingency management (CM) and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) are the most appropriate approaches for CUD [2, 4,5,6]. Moreover, there is some evidence to suggest that adding CM to CBT in the treatment of cocaine-related disorders, especially at the beginning of treatment, can help to improve and maintain abstinence at 6-months [3].

Diagnosing Substance Dependence

• For example, a person may become dependent on a pain medication prescribed by their doctor.
• And here, too, among the committee members, the decision to introduce the term «addictive» into the DSM-5 was arrived at through disagreements and non-consensus.

That is, higher levels of craving at baseline predicted fewer months of consecutive abstinence. In addition, a higher proportion of days per week of craving before the start of treatment predicted a higher craving proportion during treatment [14, 18]. Two RCTs found that the LDA (consecutive weeks of negative urine samples during treatment) predicted abstinence at 9-months posttreatment. In addition, the greater the number of negative samples submitted during treatment, the higher the long-term abstinence rate [11, 31]. Specifically, [31] and colleagues found that every one week increase in LDA increased the odds of a negative urine test by 21%. Research published by The Lancet shows that early, preventive strategies in primary care can be effective, and a variety of interventions are available to treat alcohol dependence.

Physical vs. Psychological Addiction

As I’d mentioned in earlier posts, our current best notions about addiction are that the process involves some obvious physical and psychological processes and some much more subtle effects on learning that are still being studied. A study I’m currently conducting is meant to test whether https://ecosoberhouse.com/ drugs interfere with some of the most basic learning processes that are meant to limit the amount of control that rewards have over behavior. Such fine distinctions are no doubt the result of the ways in which drugs alter the neurochemical reactions that take place in our brain.

Sutter Health

When someone struggles with the psychological ramifications of addiction, they feel a compulsion or overwhelming need to use. Remission can be divided into four subtypes — full, early partial, sustained, and sustained partial — depending on if and when any of the criteria for abuse or dependence have been met. The remission category can also be used for patients receiving agonist therapy (e.g., methadone maintenance) or for those living in a controlled drug-free environment. Depending upon whether the patient exhibits physiological symptoms (withdrawal or tolerance), the diagnosis for substance dependence is specified as either with or without physiologic dependence.