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Integrated Treatment Centers: Bridging the Gap Between Mental Health and Addiction Services

If you are struggling with addiction and co-occurring mental health disorders, you need an integrated treatment center. Integrated treatment centers serve as comprehensive treatment facilities that bridge the gap between addiction treatment and mental health treatment by providing what is sometimes called dual diagnosis or co-occurring services.

These programs offer a continuum of services for both mental health disorders and addiction overseen by multidisciplinary teams providing comprehensive treatment for each condition simultaneously. This ensures that individuals get the best approach toward recovery, learn how to recognize triggers and avoid relapse, and get the long-term support they need.

Why Use Integrated Treatment Centers

There are several reasons to utilize integrated treatment centers.

Comprehensive Care

When you work with integrated treatment centers, you can receive comprehensive care beyond what you would get from a specialty center. A regular treatment center might be able to offer a single type of care like talk therapy or family therapy, but they might not specialize in comprehensive care for things like trauma-informed treatment or co-occurring mental health and substance abuse disorders.

When you work with a facility like Ava Recovery, you get comprehensive care that covers a wide range of potential disorders and needs, including:

  • Dual diagnosis treatment
  • Specialty care like trauma-informed treatment

Multidisciplinary Teams

Integrated treatment centers offer access to multidisciplinary teams. Not all facilities are the same, and certain facilities will only staff a handful of medical or mental health professionals, but they won't have all of the multidisciplinary leaders that you might need for optimum treatment.

For example:

  • Someone looking to receive treatment for a personality disorder and co-occurring addiction might need a therapist who specializes in personality disorders, not just a therapist with a background in depression. 
  • Alternatively, someone who is looking to incorporate medication management might need a doctor to work with their psychiatrists to prescribe the right medication and ensure that everything is properly documented with the insurance providers where necessary.

The best treatment centers offer multidisciplinary teams for comprehensive care and a wide range of services that best meet individual circumstances rather than trying to cast a wide net and please everyone with the same program.

Ava Recovery

Another reason to work with integrated treatment centers is the accessibility of the continuum of services. 

Many facilities provide treatment plans that stop after a certain level of care, like outpatient programs, which are generally preferred by many people based solely on price but not on service.

Other treatment centers provide comprehensive care, but they cut off services as soon as you finish a program, leaving you to deal with relapse prevention and trigger management without any support.

The better centers, like drug detox in Austin, offer a continuum of services that go beyond your time at a treatment center and offer things like alumni programs and access to aftercare. Alumni programs and aftercare are crucial elements in preventing relapse. 

These programs give you a network of sober, supportive friends and individuals to whom you can turn for outdoor activities, sober activities, advice, or just empathy. Loneliness and isolation are some of the single greatest contributing factors to relapse, but participation in aftercare programs, alumni programs, and support groups facilitated by your treatment center can help you surround yourself with individuals who are there to help you.

Our drug rehab in Austin offers things like:

  • Residential programs
  • Family therapy
  • Aftercare