The first intervention that the person must do to help an addict is to assimilate the belief that drug addiction can be overcome. The second step is certainly to find out about the type of substance that your child or friend takes, how much and how it is taken. Many serious addicts tend to take any type of drug (cocaine, amphetamines, cannabis, ecstasy, heroin, marijuana, ketamine), while in less serious cases, there are those who take only one type of drug, such as cocaine. There comes the use of the rehab for drugs.

• Individualized intervention is the basis of a good therapeutic start. Some therapeutic-rehabilitative protocols are based on interventions that can be generalized to every drug addict, but before a course of treatment it is of fundamental importance to analyze the personal motivations of the individual person, the family relationships, the socio-cultural situation, the history of his life, the subject’s mental state and the presence of other mental or physical illnesses, always trying to understand why the subject in the analysis assumes or has started to take drugs.

The drug addict patient generally has a very low level of self-esteem, social and family relationships characterized by conflict and disappointment, economic difficulties and social integration. To intervene and help an employee with drugs is therefore important a global analysis, a careful observation of its history and its experiences and of the current mental state, this is clearly done by specialists in the field.

The Requirements

A person who wants to help a relative, a friend or an acquaintance, must try to create a relationship based on trust with the latter, becoming a point of reference for friendship support, without falling into the typical requests for money for the drug purchase. In other words, we must become an authoritative friend, know how to say no when it is appropriate, and be able to advise and make the patient reflect when his level of awareness is sufficiently moderate.

The purpose of creating an authoritative friendship relationship is aimed at ensuring that the addict can be ” helped to get help “, motivating him to turn to drug addiction services, better known as SerT , dedicated to treatment, prevention and detoxification. 

Physical and psychological from psychoactive substances

How to help an addict

We absolutely do not recommend self-care. Often, especially in the past, it has happened that some ill-informed parents linked their child to bed in moments of abstinence or closed them in the room, without the possibility of going out until the dependency was not exceeded.

These ancient and do-it-yourself methods, in addition to causing much suffering to the drug addict during withdrawal symptoms, do not intervene absolutely on psychological dependence, with the result that when the drug addict leaves home, regaining his freedom, he will return to taking drugs, precisely because the psychological dependence on the pleasurable sensation given by the drug, has not been absolutely treated during such forced treatment – at home.