Drug Addiction Treatment Radom

Drug addiction treatment is planned help spread over months, meant to bring the addicted person to lasting abstinence and back to ordinary life: work, home, relationships with those closest to them. It does not come down to stopping the drug alone, because the outcome is decided by what lies beneath it, and so we deal with the whole patient, not only with the addiction.

The most common misunderstanding is confusing treatment with detox. Detox, the clearing of the substance from the body, interrupts the drug's action and can be the first step, but it does not touch what pushed the patient toward it. That is why real treatment begins only after detoxification. We describe the course of withdrawal itself and the first days separately, on the drug detox page.

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

It is easy to think that an addicted person simply has a weak character or never really tried. In reality the brain learns to use the same way it learns any other repeated activity, except that this lesson is exceptionally strong. It is driven by the reward system, the same one that rewards us with dopamine for closeness to another person or for good news.

A drug triggers this system more strongly than anything natural, so the brain begins to treat it as something more important than food, sleep or relationships with people. With repeated use the brain's own receptors grow quieter, and the substance itself is now needed just to feel normal. Things that used to bring joy stop working.

A learned reflex, not a matter of character

The brain also remembers the circumstances in which the drug was taken, for example a specific time of day or an argument that stirred up tension. Later the situation alone is enough for the craving to appear, before any conscious decision is even made. That is why a relapse is not proof of ill will but the effect of a reflex the brain has learned through repetition.

Added to this is the weakening of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for planning and holding back impulses, while the urge itself grows stronger at the same time. That is why willpower alone is not enough to overcome it.

This is a chronic condition, similar to diabetes or hypertension, that one can learn to live with. Treatment is not about adding more determination, but about rebuilding the reward system and learning new responses to old signals.

The biggest difficulty at the start is neither medical nor organisational. It is cognitive: two problems look like one and hide each other.

Some drugs can leave behind a state indistinguishable from depression. Prolonged use and withdrawal produce anxiety, insomnia and irritability that could just as well be an anxiety disorder present for years. It works the same way in reverse: someone who has long had depression or struggles with psychosis reaches for a drug to quiet it, and after a while there is no longer any way to say which came first.

What tells a symptom of drug use apart from a symptom of mental illness?

At the first appointment this usually cannot be settled, and it is more honest to say so plainly than to reach for a premature diagnosis. The picture of a mental disorder becomes credible only once the substance stops obscuring it, and that takes a period of relative stability. So at the outset we do not start from a label but from what can be seen now, and we treat the diagnosis as something still to be established.

This question comes back with every dual diagnosis, and there is no quick answer to it. The order of events in a patient's life can be misleading, because memory arranges it to fit the story a person tells about themselves.

Instead of guessing, we observe. Once the acute phase passes and a few weeks of relative stability set in, some symptoms recede along with the drug use and some remain. What remains is usually a separate illness that the drug masked or dulled. What disappears was an effect of the use itself. That difference is the heart of the plan, because it decides whether addiction treatment is enough or whether parallel psychiatric care is needed.

How do you know the diagnosis has finally settled?

In practice this means we hold the first diagnosis provisionally and are ready to change it. A psychiatrist steps in when the picture refuses to clear, or when the condition is serious enough that waiting is not an option. The rest of the time is patient work of separating one from the other, week after week, until it is clear what we are really treating.

Since the diagnosis matures over time, the treatment plan cannot be a rigid schedule fixed in the first week. It is more a framework that we adjust as the picture clears.

At first the priority is stabilisation: reaching a state where the patient is not stuck in an acute crisis and anything can be assessed at all. Then comes psychotherapy, and this is where most of it is decided. Talking week after week shows which difficulties ease along with abstinence and which hold on regardless of it, and this is the very material the diagnosis rests on. Therapy is therefore not an add-on to the diagnosis but the place where that diagnosis takes shape.

We do not state up front how many months it will take, because with two intertwined problems the honest answer is: it depends. What usually lengthens it is a previously unrecognised mental illness, a lack of support at home and a return to the same surroundings. The plan allows for the fact that a second diagnosis can change everything we established at the start.

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.

A relapse in a dual diagnosis is easy to read as a failure of willpower. More often it is information, and quite specific information at that: something in the picture has shifted.

When someone treated on both fronts at once goes back to using, the first question is not why they did not try harder but which side moved. Sometimes the mental illness we thought was under control has quietly worsened, and the drug has again become a way to quiet it. Sometimes the addiction itself has regained strength and the mind has followed it. A relapse sends us back to the diagnosis to check what has changed, rather than simply demanding more of the patient.

The practical conclusion is that after a relapse we do not start from scratch or wipe out the work done so far. We correct what turned out to be misdiagnosed and move on with a clearer picture.

In the differentiation described above, the family plays a part that no clinical interview can replace. A patient in the middle of addiction can rarely give a reliable account of what they were like before they started using, or when the first trouble with mood or anxiety appeared. Those close to them remember.

So we ask the family not to police or to file reports but for the history. Whether the withdrawal and sadness were there before the drugs appeared, or came together with them. Whether anyone in the family had a mental illness before. This timeline, which the patient cannot set out alone, often decides whether we are dealing with two problems at all, or with one.

It is worth knowing that the official registers will not show this. In Radom's social welfare records, the number of families supported because of drug addiction has for years stayed in the range of a handful to a dozen or so a year, while the same figures for alcohol fell over the decade from more than five hundred to a few dozen. The register can move, then; it is just that families affected by drugs are barely in it. Material rock bottom comes late and touches few, whereas the decisive moves by those close to the patient happen far earlier, long before any statistic.

The scale of the drug problem in Radom depends on where you draw the line on the map, and that is a difficulty, not a curiosity.

For the city alone, the police register of offences under Poland's drug prevention act gives numbers that jumped over five years with no clear direction: from 265 in 2020 down to 148 in 2022 and back up to 209 in 2024. In that same year, 2024, the Radom subregion, which takes in the city and the surrounding districts, recorded a fall, while the whole Mazowieckie province stayed almost flat. Three levels, three different answers to the same question, in a single year.

Such a divergence means one thing: the number of recorded offences measures above all the intensity of law enforcement in a given area, not how many people use drugs. With a detection rate holding above ninety per cent in the city, the register mainly shows where and how hard the police were working. That is why we do not build the treatment plan on statistics but on what the patient actually comes in with.