Drug addiction treatment Poznań

Drug addiction treatment is planned help, spread over months, that aims to bring the person who is addicted to lasting abstinence and back to ordinary life: work, home, relationships with those close to them. It is not about stopping the drug alone but about changing the situation that led to using in the first place, which is why we work with the whole patient, not just the addiction.

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

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

Before someone even realises they have a problem, something happens in the brain that is already visible after the first few times. The drug enters the reward system, the same mechanism that normally rewards us with dopamine when we eat a proper meal after a hungry day or meet someone close. The substance triggers it with a force no natural stimulus can produce.

The brain records this experience as something exceptionally important, more important than food, sleep or relationships. Repeated use makes the brain's own receptors quieten down. That is why, over time, ordinary things that once brought joy stop working, and the substance itself becomes necessary just to feel normal.

Where craving comes from without any clear reason

Over time the brain starts to link using with a particular place or a particular person it was used with. Later it takes only being in the same place or seeing that person for craving to appear, before any decision is even made. That is why returning to the old surroundings can be so dangerous, and a relapse does not signal bad will but a reflex the brain has learned.

On top of this comes a weakening of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that plans and holds back impulses. Control weakens precisely when the urge is strongest, so determination alone is not enough to win.

This is a chronic condition, like diabetes or high blood pressure, but it can be managed. Treatment consists of rebuilding the reward system and teaching the brain new responses to old signals, not another attempt to force oneself through.

The question we hear most often once withdrawal is over is what decides whether it works this time. The answer is uncomfortable, because the factors do not carry equal weight, and the heaviest ones rarely concern the treatment itself.

• If depression, an anxiety disorder or psychosis sits alongside the addiction, treating only one side usually fails to hold. That plan needs a psychiatrist alongside the therapist, not instead of one.
• The patient usually returns to the same address, the same people and the same daily rhythm, and therefore to the same triggers. Treatment that ignores this works against the current for its whole duration.
• Having someone close on the side of treatment changes the course more than their role would suggest. This is not about supervision, it is about whether the patient has someone to talk to in the week when motivation drops.
• Staying in contact with the clinic matters most where you would least expect it. The greatest risk sits not in the day of withdrawal but in the weeks when nothing bad is happening and an appointment feels unnecessary.

The first three items are settled outside the consulting room. That is why a conversation about the treatment plan starts here with questions about home, work and immediate surroundings, before the form of therapy is even chosen.

Of the elements treatment can influence directly, psychotherapy shifts the outcome the most. Withdrawal removes the substance, therapy deals with what the patient was reaching for it for: regulating tension, handling emotions, relationships, a sense of purpose in a day without the drug.

The work happens one to one and in a group, and the group is not a cheaper stand-in for individual sessions but a different tool: it confronts the patient with the experience of people in a similar position, which no conversation with a therapist replaces. Formats, how sessions run and the rules of participation are set out on the page about addiction therapy in Poznań.

Therapy demands regularity, and its effects arrive unevenly. The first weeks are often harder than the period right after withdrawal, because states the substance used to mute come back.

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.

The plan is drawn up after diagnosis and runs through four stages: initial contact with an assessment of health, stabilisation, psychotherapy proper, and holding the change. The stages have no fixed timeframes and we do not quote them in weeks, because the pace depends on the substance, how long it was used, general health, and the patient's family and working situation.

What lengthens a plan

What does lengthen a plan is known. A co-occurring mental illness needs a psychiatrist running alongside. No support at home means the patient goes through every harder week alone. Returning to an environment where the substance is available calls for extra work on high-risk situations.

Some patients, once assessed, need conditions that outpatient care cannot provide, above all a longer break from their current surroundings. In that case we point to residential treatment in Poznań and help arrange the transfer, rather than running treatment in a form that will not be enough in that particular case.

Relapse is part of how addiction runs, not proof that the treatment was wrong or that the patient failed. One thing decides its consequences: how long it takes the patient to get back in touch.

Coming back after a few days usually means adjusting the plan and tightening the schedule of appointments. Coming back after a few months means, in practice, starting again from stabilisation, because tolerance rebuilds in the meantime and earlier patterns return. The greatest damage is done not by reaching for the substance but by the break in treatment the patient manages alone, usually out of shame.

So at the planning stage we agree explicitly what the patient does if abstinence breaks, who they call and how quickly. Treatment after a relapse does not start from scratch and does not lose what has been built.

Family influences the outcome more strongly than the choice of any particular therapeutic method, though not by controlling the patient. The real tools relatives have are clear conditions for living together, consistency in holding to them, readiness to talk, and therapy of their own, because years spent living beside someone who is addicted leave a mark on people who never used.

The scale of that burden is countable in Poznań. The number of Poznań families granted social assistance on grounds of drug addiction rose from 63 in 2018 to 100 in 2024, and across the Greater Poland Voivodeship over the same period from 344 to 539. The city now accounts for 18.6 percent of such families in the region while holding 15.4 percent of its population, and has two and a half times more of them than the county in second place.

One caveat belongs with those figures. The year 2022 falls out of the series: the number of families drops to 47, only to return to 86 a year later. The same break appears that year in the alcohol register, which points to a change in how data was recorded rather than a year of improvement for Poznań families. The direction of the whole series is reliable; a single year is better not read literally.

First contact is a consultation at which we establish health status, history of use, previous attempts at treatment, and the situation at home and at work. Only then does a plan take shape. Either the patient or someone close looking for information can get in touch, though treatment of an adult begins when that adult agrees to it.

What to bring to the first consultation

It is worth bringing records from earlier treatment, hospital discharge letters and a list of current medication to the consultation. If the substance being used is prescription medication, the right starting point is often treatment for medication dependence in Poznań, because withdrawal there runs and is planned differently.

We set appointments without a waiting list, and the clinic at Górki 17A is open seven days a week. The scope of care and organisational terms are set out in the price list, and appointments are booked through contact.

For a patient who came off substances by their own decision, this is the least relevant question on the page. For families it matters a great deal. An adult addicted to drugs cannot be sent for treatment against their will in Poland. A family court can order compulsory treatment only for a person under 18, for up to two years, under Article 30 of the Counteracting Drug Addiction Act.

For an adult, court-involved treatment appears only through criminal procedure: where the charge carries up to five years, a prosecutor may suspend proceedings for the duration of treatment, under Articles 71 and 72 of the same Act. That is a consequence of an ongoing case, not a route a family can set in motion.

With alcohol the rules work differently and a court can compel an adult into treatment too, on application from a municipal commission or a prosecutor. We describe that difference under alcohol addiction treatment in Poznań. Carrying that assumption over to drugs is the most common misunderstanding relatives arrive with.

People planning treatment sometimes check the statistics to gauge the scale of the problem in their city. The figures for Greater Poland show why that is an unreliable reference point.

In 2024, 685 offences under the Counteracting Drug Addiction Act were recorded in Poznań, against 725 in 2020, with the figure fluctuating between 610 and 887 in between. Across the voivodeship there were 7,953. The highest count, however, was not in Poznań but in Nowy Tomyśl County, population 75,000, where 1,825 such offences were recorded against 401 the year before. Per resident that is about nineteen times more than in Poznań, and the detection rate there was 100 percent in each of the last three years.

What the police register really measures

This does not mean there are nineteen times more addicted people in a rural county than in the regional capital. It means the police register measures the activity of the services and the cases they uncover, not the number of people who are addicted. A detection rate of 100 percent is typical of offences uncovered on the services' own initiative, where the perpetrator is known by definition.

For the patient and their family this has one practical consequence. A city's position in such a ranking, high or low, says nothing about access to treatment or about the prognosis in a particular case. Those questions are answered by the factors described above on this page.