Mental illness comes in many forms, and with those many forms of mental illness comes a wide array of symptoms and conditions. Those conditions can often be very bleak for those who suffer. What is unclear is exactly what will work regarding treatment for each individual. What is clear, however, is that we are learning more and more about mental illness and how to treat it than we ever have before.
One thing that seems to be clear about mental illness is that it can also be accompanied by drug and alcohol addiction problems. Sometimes, it is through drugs and alcohol that a mentally ill individual will try to self-medicate, only ending up making things much worse than they were, to begin with.
Addiction and death are very real probabilities when it comes to drugs and alcohol. Every year, roughly 27,000 people die from overdoses of heroin and other opioids. Often, these addictions can begin with mental health issues at the core. Depression is often at the root of experimentation with drugs and alcohol, and if a patient can break free from the addictions, depression can often follow.
In the past, not much in the way of medication was able to be offered to a depression sufferer. or, the medications that were available would not do much to change the course of a patient’s life for the better, only make them numb and feeling half alive. Today, doctors are beginning to use ibogaine for depression as well as for the aiding of addiction problems.
While prescribing ibogaine for depression is relatively new, it has been shown to improve the lives of patients to a great degree after they work through addiction withdrawal and recovery. The withdrawal symptoms of most opioids can range from one to three days and taper off after about a week or so, but it is the chronic symptoms of anxiety, insomnia, and depression that afflict many suffers for weeks or even months.
Using Ibogaine for depression can improve the quality of life for a patient during the recovery period initially and in the long-term as well. Drug treatment is a complicated process and one of the reasons this is so is that no one treatment is a blanket answer for every patient. Addiction treatment takes time and patience. Many people do not respond to treatment the first time around. Unfortunately, many have to come back several times before they can comfortably declare themselves on the road to recovery.
According to the National Council on Alcoholism, an astonishing 23 million Americans who are over the age of twelve suffer from addiction to either alcohol, drugs, or both. A treatment program may or may not be in their future, but one thing is for sure–without help, many of those 23 million Americans will die. That doesn’t have to be the case. We can do more.
