This means your chance of resolving your substance use problem may be better if you simply avoid treatment! If you look at the numbers I highlighted in blue on the table above you’ll see that 23.8% of those who were never treated are still dependent – yet 28.4% of those who have been treated are still dependent. The study breaks the total group down into those who have received treatment (including 12-step group involvement) and those who haven’t ever received treatment. Point #2: You Have A Better Chance of Ending Your Addiction If You Are Never Exposed To Treatment Programs or 12-Step Programs. The odds are that you are three times more likely to end your addiction than you are to continue your addiction! We know this from the data above and in Figure 2 (shown to the right). This one fact proved by this study offers a lot of hope for those with substance use problems. That leaves the other 75% as no longer Dependent. The fact is that at any given time, of people who could be classified as Dependent in a time prior to the past year, only 25% of them are still dependent. This study proves a few key points that directly contradict the common knowledge about addiction: Point #1: Most People Cease to Be Substance Dependent Figure 2 They are questioned about past substance use and diagnosed with the DSM-IV criteria for Substance Dependence. It’s important to realize that this is representative of the general population. Here is the most important table from the study, so you can look at the numbers yourself: But what we find when we broaden our scope, like in this study, is that the majority of people with Substance Dependence (as defined in the APA’s DSM-IV) actually quit on their own without any sort of treatment or 12-step involvement. Those studies often find that people relapse quickly without continued treatment, leading to the erroneous assumptions that addicts can’t quit without treatment, or that addiction is a chronic disease, and especially that abstinence is necessary and that successful moderation is rarely attainable – among other nonsense.
This data is relevant because it comes from a survey representative of the US population as a whole – unlike many addiction studies which only survey people who go through treatment programs. The study is an analysis of data from 2001-2002 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions, or NESARC for short. I’m constantly referencing this study in my writing, so I figured I should post up the main information from it here.
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