Co-Occurring Mental Illness and Opioid Use: One Family's Story
Psychology Today
Substance Use, Stigma, and Society
Co-Occurring Mental Illness and Opioid Use: One Family's Story: The Rhodes family discusses their journey to find care for their son. By Jonathan Avery, MD, and Joseph Avery, JD, MA Posted Dec 02, 2019
Substance use seldom occurs in isolation. It typically is accompanied by other mental health conditions. This is problematic, given that individuals with co-occurring mental illness and substance use tend to receive incomplete treatment—and incomplete treatment leads to poor outcomes (Avery & Barnhill, 2017).
There are many reasons why clinicians fail to properly treat individuals with co-occurring mental illness and substance use. For one, they feel inadequately trained to work with such individuals. Medical schools and other training programs teach a single diagnosis at a time, ignoring the more common and more perplexing situation of multiple diagnoses (Avery, Zerbo, & Ross, 2016). In addition, once substance use is involved, clinicians may think that other doctors should take over care. At such a point, it is easier to refer to another provider than to continue taking care of the patient themselves.
That said, negative attitudes and stigma towards individuals with multiple disorders may play the largest role in the poor treatment of individuals with co-occurring disorders. Our research has shown that clinicians’ attitudes toward individuals diagnosed with co-occurring disorders may be worse than their attitudes toward individuals with other medical and mental health diagnoses (Avery, Dixon, Adler et al., 2013). And, of course, stigmatizing attitudes are perceived by patients and have been shown to decrease treatment adherence and to worsen psychological distress.
In this blog post, we invite the family of Taylor Rhodes to talk about their son and their journey to find care for his co-occurring disorders.