Drug addiction treatment Gliwice

Drug addiction treatment is planned help spread across months, meant to lead a dependent person to lasting abstinence and a return to ordinary life: work, home and relationships with loved ones. It is not about giving up the drug alone, but about changing what led to use in the first place, which is why we work with the whole patient, not only with the addiction.

The most common misunderstanding is confusing treatment with detox. Detox, the clearing of the body, interrupts the drug's action and is usually the first step, but it does not change what pushed the patient toward the substance. That is why proper treatment only begins after detox. The course of withdrawal itself and the symptoms of the first days we describe separately, on the page about drug detox in Gliwice.

We build the plan individually, after a consultation and an assessment of health, and we run it fully privately, without a contract with the National Health Fund.

In everyone's head there is a quiet system of prompts. When we are hungry and eat, or when we feel closeness to another person, the brain sends a signal in the form of dopamine and remembers: that was good, worth repeating. This mechanism, the reward system, came into being to lead us toward the things needed for survival.

When the substance takes over the prompting system

A drug switches on exactly the same system, but more strongly than any natural stimulus. The brain then learns a false lesson: that the substance is more important than food, sleep, or the people close to us. This is not a matter of character, it is biology that begins to work against the person. That is why addiction is treated today as a disease, like diabetes or hypertension, and not as a choice or a lack of will.

With regular use the brain tunes itself to the new situation and quiets its own receptors. Ordinary pleasures stop giving satisfaction, and the substance becomes necessary just to feel normal. At the same time the prefrontal cortex loses its ability to inhibit impulses and to plan, so control over behaviour drops while the urge to reach for the substance grows.

On top of this comes learning through associations. A particular place where the person used, or the ordinary tension of everyday life, can themselves trigger craving before any conscious thought appears. That is why returning to old circumstances can be so hard, and why relapse does not mean that someone was not trying.

It is a chronic condition that one can learn to live with, much like other long-lasting diseases. Treatment does not consist of simply trying harder, but of rebuilding the reward system and working out new responses to old signals.

Families who have previously sought help with alcohol arrive with a ready picture of the procedure: commission, application, court, obligation to undergo treatment. With drugs it looks different, and this is the most frequent misunderstanding in phone calls. Two acts settle a similar family situation in three different ways.

Can a court refer an adult to drug treatment?

1. Alcohol. The obligation to undergo addiction treatment is ruled on by the district court, at the request of the municipal commission for solving alcohol problems or of the prosecutor, also with regard to an adult (art. 24-26 of the Act on Upbringing in Sobriety). We describe this route on the page about alcoholism treatment in Gliwice.
2. Drugs, a minor. The family court may order a person who is under 18 years of age to undergo treatment and rehabilitation for a period of no longer than two years (art. 30 of the Act on Counteracting Drug Addiction). This is the only case in which a parent's application has direct force.
3. Drugs, an adult. No order at the request of the family is provided for. Treatment instead of proceedings appears only in criminal procedure: where the case involves an offence punishable by imprisonment of up to five years, the prosecutor may suspend the proceedings for the duration of treatment (art. 71-72 of the same act).

There remain also incapacitation and admission to a psychiatric hospital without consent, provided for in the Act on Mental Health Protection. The threshold there is very high and concerns mental state, not drug use itself, so treating this as a route for the family leads nowhere.

Since an adult cannot be ordered into treatment, the whole question moves elsewhere: what makes someone say yes on their own. In practice this is rarely a single decision taken once and for all. Consent tends to be unsteady, it is withdrawn after a few days and comes back after another difficult event. This is usually what its forming looks like, and families who expect it cope more easily with the first withdrawal.

What helps and what closes the conversation?

Specifics help more than diagnoses. A sentence about how much money disappeared last month and which night ended in the emergency room does more than the label of an addict, because a label can be rejected while events are hard to question. What also helps are conditions the family is actually ready to keep, and a date by which something will happen. An ultimatum spoken in anger and withdrawn a week later teaches exactly the opposite lesson.

Arranging treatment behind someone's back closes the conversation. An appointment cannot be booked for an adult in such a way that they find a ready-made plan waiting, because their consent is needed at the first contact anyway, and the sense that the family acted in secret costs more than the appointment date gained. If the patient does not want to come for now, the first consultation can be held with the family alone and used to agree what to say and what not to promise.

Relatives of a person with an addiction have usually spent years taking over their duties: paying off debts, explaining absences at work, making sure nobody found out. Such an arrangement keeps the family under constant strain and at the same time pushes back the moment when the consequences reach the patient. Therapy for relatives is not an add-on to his treatment, but separate work that can be started before he decides anything. Some families come to us in exactly that order.

How many families in Gliwice seek help because of drugs?

Considerably fewer than the scale of the phenomenon would suggest. The number of families granted support by social assistance in Gliwice because of drug addiction fell from 30 in 2020 to 13 in 2024. Because of alcohol, in the same year and in the same register, there were 139 of them (Statistics Poland, Local Data Bank). With numbers this small, what is credible is the direction and the proportion, not a single year, and a figure read this way does not say how many residents use drugs. It says how many families decided to ask an institution for help, and that usually comes after years of coping alone.

The first phone call is most often made by someone from the family, and that is a fine way to start. During the call we ask about the substance and how long it has been used, about whether alcohol or prescription medicines are also involved, about chronic illnesses and about whether there have been any losses of consciousness or seizures in recent days. The answers set the order of what happens next: sometimes the first visit is a therapy consultation, sometimes the physical condition has to be dealt with first.

You do not need to bring documents, a referral or test results to the consultation. If the patient has been treated elsewhere before, it helps to know when that was and how it ended, because it changes the plan more than anything else. Registration works seven days a week, and we usually set a date within a few days of the call. Details of booking a visit are on the contact page.

What does a treatment plan consist of?

1. Diagnosis: a conversation about substances, how long they have been used, earlier attempts at treatment and state of health, supplemented by a medical examination. This is where it is settled whether a psychiatrist is needed in the plan.
2. Stabilisation of physical condition, that is bringing the patient to a point at which he is able to take part in therapy. This is the shortest stretch of the whole plan.
3. Psychotherapy conducted regularly over many months, at a rhythm agreed at the start and kept up also when the patient feels better.
4. Maintaining change: less frequent follow-up visits, recognising high-risk situations and quick contact when something starts falling apart.

We do not give a fixed number of months, because it depends on the diagnosis. It is extended by a co-occurring mental disorder, by a return to the same environment after therapy ends, by a lack of support at home and by shift work that makes regular appointment times impossible. If conditions at home interfere with therapy to the point that every further attempt ends the same way, we talk about treatment in a residential centre.

Psychotherapy takes the most time in the plan, because it is the only part that deals with what comes before reaching for a substance: insomnia, conflict at home, fear of going back to work, the sense that without the drug nothing can be endured. The course of sessions, the differences between individual and group work and what therapy looks like in practice are described on the page about addiction therapy in Gliwice.

Patients most often ask about the same thing: how this differs from an ordinary conversation with a specialist. A supportive conversation improves how someone feels in a given week, whereas addiction therapy works on a pattern that has been repeating for years and can for that reason be harder than stopping the substance itself. An improvement in mood after a few meetings is therefore a misleading signal, after which some people break off treatment.

Once the patient is stable, some sessions can be held online over video, so that travelling does not become a reason to drop out. The first appointment and the work during the hardest weeks happen in person.

What to do when a patient goes back to using?

Call within a few days, not after a few weeks. Relapse is part of the course of addiction and does not cancel what was worked out earlier, but silence after it has a real cost: the longer the patient puts off getting in touch, the more often he goes back to the dose from before treatment and the harder it is to rebuild the rhythm of visits. A break in use also lowers the body's tolerance, so going back to the earlier amount can be dangerous.

A conversation after a relapse is not about calling anyone to account. We check what came before that day, when the first thought of using appeared and what was happening at home or at work at the time, because that shows which part of the plan needs changing. Sometimes it means more frequent visits for a few weeks, sometimes bringing the family into the arrangements, and sometimes a psychiatric consultation, if the relapse was preceded by a worsening of mood.

What do the statistics say about Gliwice, and what do they not say?

The police register moves in the opposite direction to the social assistance register. Offences recorded under the Act on Counteracting Drug Addiction numbered 148 in Gliwice in 2020 and 249 in 2024. In the same period, across the whole Gliwice subregion, which apart from the city also covers Zabrze and the surrounding county, the figure fell from 567 in the peak year of 2022 to 428, and in the Silesian voivodeship from 6 308 to 4 876. The city therefore rises when the surrounding area and the region fall, and accounts for 58 percent of the events of the whole subregion with 39 percent of its population. The detection rate in Gliwice reaches 95 percent (Statistics Poland, Local Data Bank, data for 2020-2024).

The divergence between these registers comes from what each of them measures. One shows how many cases the police recorded, the other how many families came forward for support, and neither counts the people with an addiction living in the city. Neither the real scale nor the moment at which there is still time for a calm conversation at home can be read from them. Contacting the practice does not require appearing in either of them, nor any earlier report.