“What fascinates me about addiction and obsessive behavior is that people would choose an altered state of consciousness that’s toxic and ostensibly destroys most aspects of your normal life, because for a brief moment you feel okay.” – Moby
Substance abuse and addiction is a large and difficult problem for all groups. But, it is especially a problem for Native American and Alaska Native populations. The rates of binge alcohol use and illicit drug use are higher among American Indian or Alaska Native adults than the national averages (30.6 vs. 24.5 percent and 11.2 vs. 7.9 percent, respectively) and the need for treatment is higher than the national average for adults (18.0 vs. 9.6 percent). But only one in eight (12.6 percent) in need of treatment received treatment.
There is a great need for effective treatments for substance abuse overall, but particularly for the Native American and Alaska Native populations. Mindfulness based treatments have shown promise. The mindfulness based therapeutic technique Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) has been demonstrated to be effective for the treatment of substance abuse. Similarly, spirituality has also been shown to be beneficial in recovery from addictions and alcoholism (see links below).
In the treatment of Native American and Alaska Native populations there has been a glaring lack of incorporation their spiritual beliefs into the therapeutic process. This is a problem as these spiritual beliefs are critical and central to their cultures and integration of them into therapy is critical in working with this population.
In today’s Research News article “Dialectical behavior therapy with American Indian/Alaska Native adolescents diagnosed with substance use disorders: Combining an evidence based treatment with cultural, traditional, and spiritual beliefs.”
Beckstead and colleagues integrate Native American and Alaska Native spiritual beliefs into the evidence based treatment Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and applied it to treating substance abuse and addiction in Native American and Alaska Native adolescents. Remarkably they found that 90% of the 229 patients treated showed clinically significant improvement and 6% more showed improvement. No patients demonstrated deterioration.
These results are remarkable as reflected in the very large calculated effect size for the integrated treatment. This suggests that integrating culturally appropriate spiritual beliefs into treatment greatly amplifies the effectiveness of the treatment. As we discussed previously (see links below) spirituality has a number of positive characteristics that make it effective in recovery from addiction. So, its integration into secularly based treatments appears to have an amplifying effect, making these treatments even more effective.
So fight substance abuse with spiritually appropriate treatment.
“All the suffering, stress, and addiction comes from not realizing you already are what you are looking for.” – Jon Kabat-Zinn
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
LINKS
Spirituality improves recovery from addictions
Spirituality improves recovery from alcoholism
http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/spirituality-and-alcoholism-treatment/