Although traditionally addiction treatment centres have catered for patients with alcohol and drug addiction, there are more and more facilities offering help to those whose addiction does not involve psychoactive substances. Therapies are voluntary, except where ordered by court.
Addiction treatment takes place in inpatient facilities or so called day wards. The next step usually involves a standard outpatients’ clinic treatment.
Therapies are provided by units with a status of public or non-public healthcare centres. The latter are generally run by private individuals and NGOs.
While choosing a centre, it’s worth looking into its services and therapeutic programme, checking how long it has operated and what experience the personnel has. Therapist certification systems have been introduced by the State Agency for the Prevention of Alcohol Related Problems (PARPA) and the National Bureau for Drug Prevention (KBDSPN).
Alcohol addiction treatment
As stressed by PARPA, psychotherapy is used as the basic treatment method. Medical proceedings are only to complement it.
PARPA further states that for a therapy to be effective, it should last 18-24 months. The first, basic stage in inpatient units and day hospital wards takes from six to eight weeks, and is followed by a 4-6 month treatment in outpatient clinics.
Drug addiction treatment
As with alcohol addiction, the treatment of drug-addicted patients is provided within a system of outpatient and inpatient facilities. The most popular method in Poland is inpatient treatment.
A separate role, usually connected with outpatient care, is played by replacement therapy programmes. The chief methods aimed at helping addicts include psychosocial care and pharmacological therapy.
Pharmacological therapy is mainly carried out under replacement therapy programmes (substitution therapy) and detoxications (organism cleansing).
Replacement therapy consists in the administration of substances with similar properties to the drug which has led to addiction. As basic medications, this form of treatment employs methadone and buprenorphine. These help in preventing withdrawal syndromes, reduce mental “craving" for opiates and mitigate health- and social-related effects of addiction.
This is a good way for patients who didn’t overcome addiction through abstinence, to live a normal life again. However, access to replacement programmes in Poland is still poor and some voivodeships haven’t introduced them at all.
How the centres work
The best known organisation running addiction treatment centres in Poland is the Monar association. Each of its more than 30 facilities implements a custom programme based on the therapeutic community method, broadly employed at Monar - patients live together, jointly caring about the welfare and the proper functioning of a given centre.
The programmes are tailored to specific age groups – there are treatment centres for children and teenagers up to 19 years of age, for young people aged 19-25 and for adults. It takes from six months to two years to complete a therapy.
Some of the centres have their own hostels, at which patients, following a therapy, make their first steps back to a normal life.
In addiction treatment, it is crucial that patients learn how to spend their free time in complete sobriety. Monar centres offer hippotherapy, knight fellowships, football clubs, etc.
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