Addiction Treatment Outcomes: Examining the Impact of an Inpatient Program for Substance Use Disorders and Concurrent Mental Distress

ABSTRACT

Substance use disorders (SUDs) affect over 35 million individuals worldwide and are associated with significant harms. Residential treatment is an essential component of Canada’s approach to combating SUDs, offering highly intensive and specialized acute services. Historically, residential treatment facilities have quantified the success of their program(s) solely based on program completion. However, there has been a recent movement toward empirically evaluating programs using standardized measures of distress. The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether the inpatient residential program for SUDs at Edgewood Treatment Centre is effective in providing substantive improvement of a range of addiction and mental health symptoms. The current study assessed both addiction related and psychological outcomes. Specifically, we examined whether patients improved on various measures of functional impairment, addiction-related symptoms, traumatic stress, and psychological distress, following completion of the 7-week inpatient addiction program. Findings suggested that there were significant improvements in emotion regulation, and decreases in substance dependence, substance cravings, anxiety, depressive symptoms, and traumatic stress between admission and discharge.

KEYWORDS:

• Substance use
• addiction
• residential treatment

Disclosure statement

Lindsey A. Snaychuk and Christina A. Basedow report having employment contracts with EHN Canada. No other potential conflicts of interest were reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Reliable Change Index (RCI) is a concept in measurement and assessment. An RCI is a psychometric criterion used to evaluate whether a change over time of an individual score (i.e., the difference score between two measurements in time) is considered statistically significant.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.