What is extremely clear in North America as well as in any other part of the world is that drug and substance abuse is a devastating problem. Some countries have more success than others when it comes to helping addicts get free from their addictions and back out into the world. Leading a productive life is not only something that family and friends want for an addict they love, it is also the dream of the addict himself, more often than not. Drug rehab support is often the one thing that can bring an addict back to the kind of health they truly desire.

In Canada alone, 47,000 people die from some kind of substance related situation, and substance abuse continues to cost Canada, a country that has already spent $8 billion dollars on its treatment of addicts, very dearly. But the dollar amounts spent in the war against drugs in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere matter very little when you see the increase in the number of people dying each year because of drugs and alcohol.

The best hope an addict can have is an addiction treatment centre that can spur help the addict detox, develop some solid habits that replace the old, unproductive ones, and provide the addict with drug rehab support to help her live a new, drug-free life. The best rehab centers can detox a patient, but if the patient doesn’t have the desire or the will to change, she will never be able to break the patterns of her life.

In the worldwide fight against drug and substance abuse, many addicts can go through detox and rehab and come out with a fighting chance, but for some, rehab is not enough. What is becoming increasingly clear as more and more is becoming known about substance abuse is that there is a mental health factor at play in many addicts. When you compare people with a mental health condition, they are twice as likely to have some sort of substance abuse struggle, and 20% of people who are mentally ill do indeed have a problem with addictive substances.

The kind of drug rehab support that many patients need goes far beyond detox. Patients who are suffering from addiction often need mental health treatment both in rehab and on an ongoing basis when they are discharged from a program. Their support needs to come from meetings and interaction with others as well as from medication.

Medication is sometimes an issue for someone with a mental illness. For many reasons, mentally ill individuals might not want to stay on their meds. It could be that they don’t like the way the medications make them feel, or it could be that they believe that they are feeling better so they are cured.

If your loved-one suffers from substance abuse or mental illness or both, the support you give them could mean everything.